Call My Name
by objectiveheartmuscle
Summary: After St. Basil's, Rose Hathaway went against orders to return home so that she could secretly continue her relationship with Dimitri. Now she faces a host of challenges she hadn't anticipated, including what happens when love is chosen over duty... Though what she's forgotten is the reason she was initially sent to Baia — to complete her punishment for the death of Victor Dashkov.
1. Chapter One

And we're back with the second official installment of this verse! Given that I'm still working on getting my health in order, I'm not going to commit to updating on a specific day of the week, but I will do my best to get it all out! I promise this fic will not go unfinished.

This is the sequel to _Let Me Show You_. You will be completely lost if you haven't read that already.

* * *

The fanfare of worried hugs and concerned how-are-you's from the Belikovs was just as big as Rose had expected, and between reassuring everyone half a dozen times that she was fine and trying to keep up with the family's usual rapid-fire banter, Rose was worn out before Olena had finished making tea for everyone.

"I'm just going to take it with me to bed," Rose said, gently taking a full mug in her good hand. At Olena's wary look, Rose added, "I'll be fine. I didn't sleep on the trip here, so I'm really tired."

Dimitri's hand brushed hers when she moved past him down the table to leave. "Do you need help?"

"I've got my mother," she replied quietly, glancing to the doorway where Janine stood, looking as uncomfortable as she had when they'd arrived not ten minutes earlier. "I think she could use a break."

Upstairs, Rose set her mug down on top of Dimitri's dresser and then sank onto the bed with a wince. It took her a moment to notice that her mother was still hovering near the door, taking in the room — both bedside tables clearly being used by two different people, the mix of clean clothing sitting in a basket by the closet waiting to be hung up.

"It's not—we're sharing out of necessary. It's a small house for…" Rose squinted as she did a quick count in her head, trying not to let her anxiety at her mother's amused look take over her. "There's eleven people living here and Viktoria already—"

"I'm not accusing you of anything, Rose," Janine said, her tone surprisingly soft. Her ghost of a smile faded away. "Just… observing things is all."

Rose's shoulders sank with relief. She'd been starting to feel like a thirteen-year-old defending a crush.

"You're close to them," Janine said, finally entering the room and leaning back against the wall in front of Rose, arms crossed over her chest. "All of them," she corrected.

Raising her eyebrows, Rose twisted slowly to reach for the small suitcase behind her. Alex had been kind enough to not stack Dimitri's duffel on top of it when he'd brought their luggage in earlier, she noticed.

"I've been living with them for a while," Rose said, shrugging her uninjured shoulder as she pulled out a fresh t-shirt and leggings from her luggage. "You've met Olena. It'd be hard to not respond to her mothering."

"I have." Janine stood straight, trying to appear tall despite the slightly remorseful look on her face. "I'm…sorry…that you never got that from me."

Rose's fingers froze at the hem of the leggings she currently wore. They'd had several difficult conversations over the years in the slow rebuilding of their relationship, but never before had her mother directly apologized to her.

"You did what you had to do," Rose said, trying to play off her surprise nonchalantly as she worked the cotton down and off her legs, one-handed and without standing up. "No matter how I've felt about that growing up, I've at least always understood it."

Janine looked like she wanted to say something but instead batted Rose's hand away and finished pulling off her leggings for her. "Even if you didn't…You wouldn't be alone. It's rare, but sometimes I wonder if I made the right call with you, if I should've been in your life more." She reached for the clean leggings, and Rose leaned on her mother's shoulder to stand up long enough to help get them on over her feet. "I don't know what the answer is, but I'm glad that you've had a little bit of experience in regards to having a family."

Rose had started easing off her cuff sling as Janine spoke, and she gestured with it for her mother to take when she pulled it from around her neck. "I'm not going to lie and say I never resented having to always pretend Lissa's family was my own." She winced at having to lift up her arm the slightest bit to let her mother pull her shirt off. "We both — shit, _ow_ , that hurts — we both know that's why I stopped visiting on school breaks when I was younger." A breath of relief when the new shirt was slipped up her arm and she could plaster it back against her side. "But I wouldn't trade the last few years I've had with you for anything or anyone else."

Janine looked like she didn't fully believe Rose. "You've never wanted a mother like—"

"Olena's great," Rose said, easily jumping on the train of thought. "And it's nice to be around her, but she's not my mother." She tugged her shirt down in the back, meeting Janine's look. "You are. You're the one who set the example for me—thanks." She took the two pills her mother held out to her and dry swallowed them. "I've always strived to be half the guardian you are because if I at least did that much, I'll feel like I accomplished something."

"I haven't always made the best decisions," Janine said with a small, rueful smile.

With a wince, Rose rewrapped the cuff sling to her wrist and then ducked her head under the strap. "Nobody's perfect. But you're my mother and I wouldn't want anyone else to fill that spot."

Janine nodded, about to reply when she caught sight of something. "That's quite the necklace."

"What—oh." Rose glanced down. She'd absent-mindedly been fiddling with the necklace Dimitri had given her for Epiphany; he'd returned it to her earlier in the day when she was being discharged. "Yeah, it is," she said, flushing a little.

"I stand by what I said the other day, about emotions interfering with what we do," Janine said. There was a cautious warmth about her that made Rose pay attention. "But on the other hand, I get it. I've been in love before. If you do it right, it can be one of the best experiences of your life. I'm just worried about…external influences getting in the way of your happiness."

"I'm not in love," Rose argued as Dimitri's words from the night before echoed through her mind. _Let me show you how much I love you._ "I mean, there's feelings. A lot of them. But I don't think I'm in love."

Janine's smile turned knowing and grew a little. "If you say so. But I'm serious, Rose. Be happy. You seem to be safe here. Indulge as much as you can while you're out here, because when you leave and go back to Court and your friends, it's going to be difficult to maintain whatever is going on between you and Guardian Belikov."

"You can call him Dimitri, Mom, it's not a crime or anything." She squeezed the rose charm between her fingers. "I know. I'm not thinking about it right now. I'm trying this new thing where I stop worrying about everything that could go wrong and just let myself live in the moment."

"Good. I don't know when you got so serious, and while I think it's done wonders for your maturity, I also think it's tamped down what always made you stand out from everyone else." Janine's expression grew thoughtful as her eyes stayed glued to the necklace rolling between Rose's fingers. "Your recklessness and wild spirit were stressful while you were growing up, but I never wanted it to completely disappear. All you'd have of your father then is the physical resemblance."

There was so much her mother admitted to that Rose's head started spinning. Heart-to-hearts weren't rare between them… but they weren't common either, and they always left Rose off-kilter with a new way of looking at her life.

The part about Janine not knowing when Rose turned from motivated novice to seriously dedicated guardian-in-training was a lie — Mason was really more of a best friend than a boyfriend to Rose, but he'd been by her side almost as long as Lissa and his death had really done a number on her. But Rose appreciated her mother glossing over that. Losing someone important to her and then almost losing another person just as special in a similar fashion were two things she wanted to focus on putting behind her.

Nodding slowly, Rose said, "Yeah, I've noticed. I'm trying to find a balance between the two. I don't want to completely let go of my commitments, but I can't keep up this workaholic pace I've been at since I graduated either."

"That's adulthood. You're…well, I don't want to say young. But you are only twenty-three. You'll keep growing through the rest of your twenties. You won't really have it a lot of this figured out for a while. And even then, none of us really know what we're doing anyway."

Rose grinned. "Thanks, Mom. That's comforting. I look forward to a lifetime of wondering what the fuck I'm doing. Totally makes me feel like I've got my life under control."

Janine laughed, loud and bright. "You really are Ibrahim's daughter, my God." Her smile was big and she squeezed the back of Rose's neck affectionately. "You look exhausted."

The name rung a bell, but her body sank at her mother's assessment. Suddenly, sleep sounded like heaven. "Yeah, I am."

"I'll let you get some rest, then." She made to leave and paused at the door. "No matter who you are or what you do…I'm so proud of you, Rose. I hope you know that."

Rose nodded. "I do, Mom."

"Good." She gave Rose a brief smile and left, Dimitri entering moments afterward as Rose was pushing the blankets back to slip underneath.

"Everything alright?" he asked, face clouding when Rose tried to lean back against her pillows and jostled her shoulder in the process, her face screwed up with pain.

"I would be if this country let me have something stronger than glorified Advil," she complained. "Seriously, comrade, what the hell kind of government lists _Benadryl_ as a classified substance?"

"I meant with your mother," he said, with a hint of a smile.

"Oh, me and my mom? Yeah, we're all good. We occasionally have these spontaneous bonding sessions. We see each other so rarely that when they happen, they get pretty deep, but we're trying to be closer, so I'll take it."

"You've mentioned that," he replied, sliding in next to her. She immediately folded down into his arms and he tucked her head under his chin. "That's good. I'm glad. You get really bitter when you talk about the way you were raised."

"We talked about that," she said, snuggling deeper into him when he started running his fingers through her hair. "Or, my mom did, and I mostly just reassured her that I didn't grow up hating her existence."

"She did?"

"Mhm. I think she was caught off guard by the fact that I'm not just some guest staying here, that your family treats me like your own. I don't think she really thought about it until it was right in front of her."

"That's because you're one of us. Laugh all you want, but it's true. If my mother puts you on the dish rotation, that's it. You're done. You can't escape. She'll be expecting you for the holidays every year now."

Rose was full-on laughing, her face buried in his chest. "That sounds like _such_ a _problem_ ," she drawled, biting her lip as she sobered up. "No, my mom just wanted to make sure that I wasn't, like, secretly wishing I'd been raised by your mother or anything. Which, don't get me wrong, I love your mother—"

"I know what you're saying," Dimitri said, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "They're two very different women who led two very different lives. It's incomparable."

"Yeah." Beat. "Oh. I just had a thought."

"How likely am I going to want to run in the opposite direction if I hear it?"

"I don't know. Did you see the way they greeted each other like they'd already met before?"

"Yeah?"

"Then how's this for a terrifying thought: What if our mothers became best friends?"

Dimitri groaned. "Go to sleep, Roza."

* * *

Her perfectly dreamless sleep was interrupted by a familiar pair of jade green eyes.

"Rose!" Lissa exclaimed, throwing her arms around her friend's neck.

Trying not to stagger backward, Rose clutched back at Lissa, grateful her injuries hadn't carried over into whoever's spirit dream this was. "Shit, Lissa, don't kill me. I'm right here, alive and well."

"Good," came a second voice and Lissa let go of Rose long enough to let Adrian get in a hug. "I'm not ready for your funeral just yet, little dhampir."

"Who's dream is this?" Rose asked when she pulled away from Adrian. She gave Lissa a hard look. "You're still on your meds, right?"

"Of course." Lissa almost looked offended at the accusation. "This is all Adrian. I've just been worried enough about you that he offered to pull me along."

"That's an awful lot of spirit for someone who's supposedly on new meds," Rose said, her eyes narrowed at Adrian now. He held his hands up.

"The latest stuff is taking a while to build up. I'm taking advantage of it while I can."

"Hans told me you asked to stay on your assignment," Lissa said, cutting off Rose before she could start an argument.

"I did," Rose said, "And look even if I'd wanted to come back, I would've stayed through at least getting my cast off. I wasn't going to be on the first plane home like Eddie and Sydney." To Adrian, she asked, "Did they get back okay?" and he nodded.

" _Wanted_ to come back?" Lissa echoed, disbelief splashed across her face. This time she did actually look a little hurt.

"I mean—" She pushed her thoughts about Dimitri to the side and focused on how to word her answer so that Lissa didn't take it the wrong way. This wasn't the time for Rose to admit that the biggest reason she was staying was because she wanted to see where her feelings for Dimitri would take her… only, she was beginning to selfish for doing so now that she was face-to-face with her best friend. "I have a job here, Lissa, one you gave me. I want to see it through to completion."

Lissa nodded, seeming to take the excuse for what it was. "I heard from Eddie that you suffered a concussion and broke your shoulder and wrist?"

"Yeah." Rose rolled what was her bad wrist outside the dream. She couldn't wait for it to fully heal, and it hadn't even been a week. "And then, you know, just general soreness from being tossed into a tree." She didn't mention being slowly choked out. It didn't seem like Lissa knew about that and besides, there was enough worry streaming across the bond.

"Okay. I mean, not okay, but you know…" Lissa gave a small smile. "I'm just relieved you're alive. We lost two dozen guardians despite having some preparation on our side."

"Yeah, well, you should see the other guys," Rose quipped in an attempt to cover up her unease at the number. Nobody had given her hard numbers, just that there'd been an equal number of casualties on both sides with varying degrees of injury among the survivors. Two dozen guardians, though…that was a lot of lives lost.

Lissa's image shifted as she rolled her eyes. "You're clearly fine. I hate to leave you, but my wedding planner is sending me off Court to find a dress since apparently I'm the pickiest bride in the history of forever." Her irritated look told Rose legions. "And I have to be up in daylight for that, so I gotta go."

"No worries," Rose said, a pang of sadness shooting through her at not being able to be by Lissa's side while dress shopping. It was something they'd talked about growing up, and Rose was giving it up to stay in Russia.

 _You can't have it all, Rose_ , she told herself.

She pulled Lissa in for a long, tight hug, and then let her shimmer away.

"You've been quiet," Rose noted, turning to a thus far silent Adrian.

"Watching your aura," he said, still staring at the space next to her. It was like he was looking at a photo slightly off-center. "It was glowing until you lied through your teeth about wanting to finish your assignment, and now that I bring that up, it's dimmed again. So spill, Rose. What gives?"

She shook her head. If one person knew, that was one too many. "No idea what you're talking about." _Damn, you can't even tell a bad lie well._

"Rose," Adrian said, firm but warm. "You don't lie to Lissa unless you've got a good reason. I'm just trying to make sure you're not accidentally starting World War Three here."

Silence. Someone had picked the living room of Rose's apartment at Court for the backdrop and instead of looking at Adrian or giving him a response, she folded herself up in her big plush armchair, letting its impressiveness swallow her up.

"You're not coming home because you met someone," Adrian guessed and Rose's head shot up. He laughed. "You're not as subtle as you think, little dhampir."

"I'm torn," she said, wrapping her arms around her legs.

He sat down on the large footstool in front of her. "How so?"

"Because I feel selfish!" she burst out. Once she'd come to realize exactly how she felt weeks ago, it'd been eating away at her until someone who wasn't involved had finally asked. "I should be protecting Lissa, I should be back at Court, I should _want_ to be back at Court, but I'm not. I mean, on a logical level, I know it's good for me to do something I want because I'm well aware I haven't done anything for myself in a very long time… I guess breaking twenty-three years of social conditioning is easier said than done."

"I believe it," Adrian said. "I'm still struggling with my mental health. I slip a lot. My self-esteem is about as positive as a Fox News morning talk show."

Something like a laugh coughed out of Rose's throat.

"If you want my opinion—"

"I do."

"—I think you're making the right decision. You can't be Lissa's guardian if you've killed yourself from not taking care of your personal needs. There's dedicated and then there's obsessed, and I see the latter in you more often than you think."

She wanted to say she wasn't obsessed, that it was a problem of identity — who was she outside of Guardian Hathaway, the Not Quite Yet Personal Guardian of the Queen? — but something kept her mouth shut.

"Who is it, anyway?"

"Dimitri Belikov."

Adrian's eyebrows disappeared into his hairline. "Aren't you staying with the Belikov family, too?"

"Therein lies my problem," she said with a pointed look.

He was clearly impressed at that. "That explains everything about your aura, then."

"I'm really not going to miss that about you," Rose said, half-serious. "It's really annoying having other people tell you what you're feeling."

"I'm just a nosy little shit," Adrian said with a grin. "You like this guy?"

"Didn't we _just_ establish that you know my emotions better than I do right now?"

"Yeah, well, I want to hear you say it."

Rose sucked in her lips, thinning them out to nothing as she considered her feelings. After a good minute, she looked up from her hands, nodding slowly. "Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"God, _Dad_ , I like him, okay?" Rose playfully shoved Adrian's knee with one of her feet, flashing a mocking smile.

"Good. That's good. I'm glad." He was looking at her fondly, nothing more than a man happy for his close friend. "You deserve it. You've been through enough bullshit for a lifetime. Does he make you happy?"

"That's a stupid question. Of course he does. You can see that."

"I'm just making sure." He leaned back to stretch his arms above his head. "Gotta brush up on my intimidating older brother routine for when I meet him."

"Good luck with that. He's a six-foot-seven guardian with enough muscle to knock down a small building in one swing."

Adrian pretended to look mildly cowed. "That's impressive. Where'd you find him?"

"I almost kicked him in the face in his kitchen at one in the morning."

"Only you, Rose," Adrian laughed. The dream began to go fuzzy and Adrian knocked a knuckle against her foot. "You're waking up, so I'll catch you later."

* * *

"…and then _he_ had the gall to look at me like _I_ was crazy," Janine was saying when Rose and Dimitri entered the kitchen after Paul made his round of calling everyone to dinner, "Like _I_ was the one who had nearly killed everyone by driving head-on into the caravan."

Olena pressed a hand to her mouth, trying to suppress her laughter as she stirred a large pot on the stove. "He didn't."

"He did." Janine was sitting at the table. She shook her head, auburn curls bouncing around her face. "I nearly kicked him out of the car. I didn't know where we were, but I was ready to drive back to Cairo myself if only so I didn't have to put up with him anymore."

Somewhere in the handful of hours that Rose and Dimitri napped, Rose's terrifying vision of the future was quickly realized, resulting in Janine and Olena laughing and talking like they'd known each other for years. On the surface, Janine appeared at ease with everything, but Rose could see a thin edge of wariness lining her movements that kept her from fully relaxing into the conversation. Considering the rhetoric Rose had heard Janine repeat about dhampir women staying home to raise their children, it was a huge leap forward for her mother in Rose's mind.

"I regret ever letting this happen," she whispered to Dimitri where they'd stopped short in the kitchen doorway.

"You really need to stop thinking," he muttered back. "Dangerous things happen when you do."

"Yeah," Rose said when the women across the room burst into laughter over something to do with camels spitting on men who got what they deserved. "Consider my brain turned off, now and forever."

* * *

"What a sorry sight you both are," Alex called out from the waiting car as Rose and Dimitri exited the house the following morning. "I hope whoever did this to you is well and dead."

"I stabbed him a couple times just to make sure," Dimitri deadpanned back, and Rose barked out a laugh so hard, she tripped over her own feet. "Easy there, wildcat," he said, grabbing her upper arm to keep her from faceplanting into the front yard.

"Wildcat, huh?" she asked, darting a glance at him, and he gave one of his private, easy smiles that said she was the brightest thing in his universe.

"I'm going to need to ask the chemist for something for this toothache I have just watching you two," Alex said, unlocking the car — Dimitri's, Rose fleetingly noted — and opening a

backseat door for Rose. "It's kind of disgusting."

"Yeah, and so is watching you and Karolina bicker over flower arrangements," Rose replied, sliding in behind the driver's seat.

"She has a point," Dimitri said, making a face as he slid in next to Rose.

"You'd be just as into it if it were you getting married, Mitya, don't pretend like you're better than us," Alex replied lightheartedly as he put the car in drive and pulled out onto the road.

"We're talking about you," Rose countered, mindful of her shoulder when she leaned forward and trying her best to ignore the image of standing next to Dimitri at a wedding altar that her brain insisted on lingering on.

"Yeah, because if I get married, it's not going to be any time soon," Dimitri countered.

"Whoever said that?" Rose asked without thinking, still stuck on her earlier thought.

Dimitri twisted in his seat enough to look at her, eyes blazing with questions.

"Like I said," Alex said, glancing at the two of them and then back to the road as he turned onto a different street. "Tooth. Fucking. Ache."

* * *

The pharmacist had promised them a half hour wait time to get their loads of prescriptions filled since the hospital in Omsk had only given them so many pills, not wanting to be liable for handing off full bottles of painkillers, and there was a unanimous decision to kill time in a coffee shop just down the street.

Most things about Russia had become familiar to Rose by that point — the never-ending love affair with cabbage; the way most people ignored the country-wide indoor smoking bans; women stubbornly insisting on walking in six-inch heels, even if there was a foot of snow on the ground — so she was only really taken aback by the country's drug laws because so much else was normal to her by then.

Rose was stirring milk into her tea when Alex swore pretty intensely under his breath in Russian. "Hey, Rose, isn't that your mom?"

"How many gingers do you know?" Rose asked with a pointed look. Her eyes slipped past Dimitri to where Alex was staring in confusion and her bravado dropped. She was sitting across from a man whose back was towards them, enraptured by whatever her companion was talking about. A flash of gold when he tilted his head gave him away. "Is that Zmey?"

Dimitri's head whipped around. All three were openly staring.

"How do they even know each other?" Alex asked and Rose's eyes narrowed when her mother let out a loud laugh, her head tilting back and her body sinking into the chair. However they knew each other, Rose had never seen her mother so relaxed.

"That's—" Something clicked and if Rose had been holding something, it would've shattered on the ground from her dropping it. " _No_ , oh my God, this cannot be happening."

"Rose?" Dimitri asked, turning to her. Alex glanced at her and then did a double take at whatever expression was on her face.

She was shaking her head furiously, diving for her phone. It clattered to the table and she started tapping away furiously. A few moments later, she flipped it around and slid it towards the two guys.

"It's a name etymology page for 'Abe'," Dimitri said, his confusion deepening.

"Yeah, no shit, Sherlock," Rose said, nerves shooting through the roof. "Read it." When they got to the bottom of the screen and looked up, Rose was chewing on her thumbnail. "All I know about my father," she said slowly, eyes fixed on the couple across the cafe, "Is that he's Turkish and I've heard enough people drop the name to believe his name is Ibrahim."

"Holy shit," Alex breathed and Dimitri's expression mirrored his future brother-in-law's words.

"I'm not, I can't be," Rose rambled, covering her face with her free hand as though it might hide the scene in front of her. "Shit. I'm, like, Zmeyette. Zmey Junior. Someone save me from this nightmare." A nervous bubble of laughter escaped her throat.

"That would actually…explain a lot," Dimitri murmured and when Rose and Alex turned their confusion on him, he nodded. "The first time Zmey…Rose's father… _Abe_ showed up, I was four. They had just started pulling down the wall and there was an influx of foreigners showing up. Moroi men. He was poking around, trying to find a way to my grandmother without just walking up to the front door. It was summer — I remember being forced into endless doll weddings at the hand of Karo. She's evil, by the way," he digressed to Rose. "Don't let her nurturing motherly persona fool you. That woman put me through the ringer as a child." He shook his head.

"Anyway, Yeva had said the winter before that someone important would be visiting soon, so when rumors started of a Moroi man who was looking for my grandmother but had clearly stated he wasn't there for the all the usual reasons, she let him find his way to her. My mother was skeptical, but she didn't say anything after my grandmother said her dream about a Middle Eastern man was about to be realized."

"What happened?" Rose asked, invested in the story.

Dimitri shrugged. "This is what I've pieced together over the years, so I'm not quite sure. I don't know why my grandmother was a person of interest to him; she refuses to tell the reason to anyone. He found her eventually, though, at the bank, I think, back when she was still doing things beyond gossiping with her friends and predicting the end of the world." He smiled at Rose's snort.

"My mother distracted my sisters and me in her bedroom while the two of them talked in the kitchen for hours. I know he identifies as a businessman, but doing what is a mystery to me. Lots of illegal things, I know that much. My grandmother's always very quiet about when and why he shows up. My mother eventually came into knowing that information, after my father…."

Rose reached to link her fingers with his.

"When things would get rough with money," Dimitri continued, "He'd step in and give us some help. I discovered that on accident when I was fifteen. I was pissed when I found out, but my grandmother maintained that he was important to the family and said it was in my best interest to stay in his good graces. I never understood why until today," he finished, looking over his shoulder and squeezing Rose's hand.

Janine and Abe were still talking, completely absorbed in their own world. It would be cute if Rose wasn't so unsettled by either of them showing emotion that wasn't cool detachment from everything around them.

"A name and his ethnicity is all you knew about your father?" Alex asked. Rose nodded.

"My senior year, my mom gave me a _nazar_ for Christmas. It's supposedly this protection thing. Looks like a necklace with a blue eye pendant thing. She kind of hinted later that my father had given it to her, but she's always been very quiet about him. If it _is_ Zmey, I can understand why." She paused, considering even bringing up her next words. "She mentioned being in love once, which, just, again, if it is Zmey, Mom, _what the fuck_ ," Rose whispered softly.

"Sounds like your mother's lived quite a life," Dimitri said.

Shaking her head, Rose said, "My mother was twenty when I was born. I can't imagine Abe's all that much older than her. How did they meet? _Where_ did they meet? I really can't picture her having some wild affair in Istanbul at nineteen."

Dimitri was looking at her the way he had in the car earlier, his face that of a man who had a thousand questions and a thousand more things to say in response.

"Well," Alex said, checking the time on his phone, "If you're done with your tea, we can run as far away from this mess as we can and go get your painkillers."

Rose took two long gulps, fingers barely grasping the handle, and set the mug down on the table with a little too much force. "Alright, let's blow this popsicle stand."

"What the hell does that mean?" Alex asked as they stood.

"It means something along the lines of 'let's leave'," Dimitri guessed. His eyes were narrowed and he looked at Rose questioningly. "Right?"

She laughed, pushing the door open with her good shoulder. "One day I'll teach you guys the inner workings of American slang so you can keep up."

Alex shook his head as Dimitri relinked his fingers with Rose's and none of them saw the look of panic on Janine and Abe's faces as they finally noticed their daughter in a place where she could've easily seen them.


	2. Chapter Two

Had she been younger, Rose wouldn't have hesitated to make a scene in confronting her parents in order to make a statement.

Older, more mature Rose preferred ambushing people loading duffel bags into the backseats of old, rickety cars in Siberian driveways.

"Hey, Mom!" Rose called out, approaching Janine with a walk across the front lawn that said _I'm pissed but I can't cross my arms because a Strigoi broke my shoulder._ "You know, a little warning next time would be nice."

Janine straightened, one hand resting atop the open car door. Her face was perfectly blank. "I have no idea what you're talking about, Rose."

"You. Abe." Rose huffed, a stray lock of hair blowing out of her face. "You and Abe."

Nothing.

"I've met him, Mom," Rose continued. "He's at the very bottom of people I would expect for you to hook up with, but I guess it makes sense." She paused, head tilting ever so slightly as she studied her mother. "That's why you wanted to come out here with me, isn't it? To see him?"

Janine's guardian mask barely slipped; all Rose caught was the faintest of guilty looks. "Partly, yes. You were my first priority, though."

Younger Rose would've taken that opening and run with it, but a voice in the back of her head telling her to calm down and not chew her mother out for doing her job as a parent sounded eerily like Dimitri's.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I had no way of knowing for certain if you'd met him or not." Janine's mouth twitched. "I know he floats around… _towns_ …like Baia, and that he has a lot of people in a lot of places. He always has, even since before I met him. I took a stab in the dark that he'd be here, waiting for you to return, alive and breathing. He got in touch with me through one of his guardians when we arrived."

"Lurking in the shadows is an odd way of showing fatherly concern."

Shifting her weight to her other foot, Janine shut the car door and leaned against it, shaking her head with an almost amused expression. "It's who he is. I figured out pretty quickly that—"

"Stop," Rose said, holding up a hand. "If you say 'he's not like other men', I may actually throw myself into a river. There's plenty around here."

Janine merely sighed. "Rose…"

"All joking aside—" Rose took a deep breath and steeled herself, working up the nerve to ask a question that had plagued her all her life. "What happened with you and him?"

"It was never meant to work out," Janine said. Her voice was a million miles away, off in some past era that Rose hadn't been around to see. "Wrong place, wrong time, wrong ages, I was fresh out of school and he was building the empire he has today. Wrong everything, really. We couldn't have been further opposites if we tried." She paused, her expression growing rueful. "And then when you came along…well, there wasn't much choice. We didn't live in a world like yours. Marriage would've outcasted both of us and your existence alone made him that much more vulnerable, so we parted ways and agreed you would never meet him, not unless the time was right."

"And me being exiled to my own personal gulag in Siberia for a crime nobody's actually positive I committed is the 'right time'?" Rose asked in disbelief.

Janine shrugged. "Business is slow."

"Business? What do you mean by 'business'?"

"That's not my secret to share, Rose, you'll have to take it up with Abe."

Realization sank in. "Oh God. Oh man. Shit. He really is a mobster." Another thought struck her. "Were you, like, his mobster wife for a time? With all the fancy furs and stuff like on TV?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Rose," Janine replied, exasperated. "Some of what he does is legal."

Behind Rose, on the other side of the front yard, the door slammed shut, and the voices of several people started drifting across. "Do I at least get to know the beginning? I mean, where did you two even met?"

"His hometown, Ankara." The amused twinkle was back in Janine's eyes. "I'll tell you the rest some day."

Alex came up to them on Rose's left, looking for all the world oblivious to the conversation. "Are you ready to go, Guardian Hathaway?"

"Yeah," Rose answered, flashing her mother a small but genuine smile. "She's good to go."

* * *

 **Dimitri:** Are all waiting rooms this unbearable? Because this one in particular makes me want to gouge my eyes out from boredom.

 **Rose:** wtf

 **Rose:** How so?

 **Dimitri:** IMG_2015_05_04

 **Dimitri:** I'm fairly certain I'm in monochrome hell. Send help. Brown is my favorite color.

 **Rose:** And here I was thinking that *I* was the one who made all the overdramatic exaggerations in this relationship.

 **Dimitri:** I miss your overdramatic exaggerations. I also miss the outdoors, but that's an entirely different issue.

 **Dimitri:** Do psychiatrists in the States usually take three hours just to call your name? Because we got here at 1 and Vika and Aloysha only went back a couple minutes ago.

 **Rose:** No, but your country's idea of health care leaves much to be desired.

 **Dimitri:** And there's the mostly untrue observations I've also been missing a lot.

 **Rose:** Comrade. It's been two days.

 **Dimitri:** Most people would call that a rather short honeymoon phase.

In Baia, at the Belikovs' kitchen table, Rose bit her lip in an effort to unsuccessfully cover a laugh. Her eyes immediately flicked to Yeva, who was knitting across the table, and Rose tried to quickly gather herself. If there was anyone who could read text messages through a phone, it was the Wicked Witch of the East herself.

 **Rose:** If it makes you feel better, I miss you, too.

 **Rose:** I'm sorry, that felt incredibly lame.

 **Dimitri:** How so?

 **Rose:** (Very funny, mister.)

 **Rose:** idk, I think I'm just not used to wanting someone around all the time.

 **Rose:** The past two days have been really boring without you.

 **Rose:** It also kind of makes me nervous about how I'm going to deal with you gone all summer when you go back to work.

 **Dimitri:** Roza, if that's what you feel, then that's what you feel. There's no reason to apologize for your feelings.

 **Rose:** Wait what

 **Rose:** That's it?

 **Rose:** It's that simple?

 **Dimitri:** Yes, Rose, it is.

 **Rose:** I'm sure dealing with my inexperienced ass is so much fun.

 **Rose:** Much tedious, very work.

 **Dimitri:** I don't mind. Everyone goes through life differently.

 **Dimitri:** Besides, there's plenty more that your ass—

"I had a dream about you the other night," Yeva said out of nowhere, sending Rose for such a shock that her phone flipped out of her hands and onto the ground before she could finish reading Dimitri's last text.

Slowly, Rose bent over to pick up her phone, locking the screen and putting it face down on the table just in case Dimitri thought sitting in a doctor's office at four in the afternoon was a perfectly fine time to start sexting her, and sat as straight as she could muster. For months — ever since she'd arrived in Baia — people had been warning her about Yeva's clairvoyant dreams, though as far as Rose was concerned, they were largely a non-issue because they never involved her.

"You had a dream…about _me_?" Rose asked cautiously.

It was hard to tell if Yeva was glaring at her or not with the way she was staring down into the bottom of Rose's soul. "Yes, dear, it's what happens when one sleeps at night."

Rose choked. "And what was your…dream about?"

"Oh, no," Yeva said airily, slowly pushing herself up from the table and tucking her large spool of yarn under her arm. "You don't get to know that yet. Not yet. Too soon." She stopped right next to Rose and pointed at her phone. "Remember that the wheel is spinning, always and always."

Yeva left, and Rose was still staring at the door with narrowed eyes when Paul walked in a few minutes later.

"Babushka hit you with one of her dreams?"

"Yeah. She didn't tell me what was in it."

He stopped with his hand halfway into the freezer. "Weird. She usually gives at least a hint."

"I don't know. All she told me was that the wheel is always spinning or something."

"Sounds like you're in some kind of trouble, then." He finished pulling a bottle of vodka out and tapped the neck of it against Rose's shoulder. "My best advice? Run. You're in Siberia. No one will ever find you."

She shot him a look. "Funny." Then, with a gesture towards the bottle: "Where are you going with that?"

"Viktor's." Paul flashed her a grin. "Though if anyone asks, I'd prefer it if you claimed you never saw me."

"Who are you?" she asked him, mocking confusion.

"Excellent. I'll be back later." He jerked his chin towards Rose's phone. "And tell my uncle he doesn't have nearly as much game as he thinks he does."

Paul laughed at Rose's blanch all the way out the door.

* * *

 **APRIL 6 [TRANSCRIPT]**

Dinner.

…

Y: Olena, Zmey said to pass this along to you before he left the other day.

[paper rustling in background]

Z: Miss Rooooose, are we going to the lake tomorrow?

[paper unfolding in background]

R: Yes, Zoya, we are.

Z: Can Dasha from down the street come, too?

R: Yes, Zoya, she can.

[paper folding in background]

O: Thank you, Mama.

…

* * *

She was standing in front of the living room window when the car pulled up, and she gripped the windowsill to keep her in place. As much as she wanted to run out into the street and throw herself into his arms — a juvenile, lovesick urge she was surprised to realize she felt — she couldn't be flinging her shoulder around if she wanted to get out of the sling for good at her doctor's appointment in a few days.

He was as gorgeous as ever. She leaned her good shoulder against the wall separating the living room from the foyer and watched him get out of the car, laughing at something Viktoria had said, his long, lean body tracing lines in the air with a grace she could never quite find in herself. Her fingers itched to run through his hair, loose and freshly washed, falling around his face as he went around to the trunk to pull their overnight bags out while Viktoria let Alexei out of the backseat. With the weather above freezing every day now, he'd very happily traded his thicker coat for that ever-present duster she saw in December. Underneath was a black shirt, jeans, and boots.

There was nothing special or out of the ordinary about the way he looked, but she found herself memorizing the way he looked nonetheless. If there was one way she wanted to remember him forever, it was this — happy, relaxed, unaware she was looking at him.

When the three made their way inside, she was waiting in the entranceway to the living room and she easily fell into his arms, her sigh of relief matching his.

"I missed you," she whispered, her fingers grasping the back of his duster as much as her cast would allow.

"I know," he murmured into her hair. "I missed you, too." He pressed his lips to her head in a lingering kiss. "You should come next time."

She looked up. "Really?"

"Of course," he said, like it was obvious. "I'm greedy enough to admit that I don't like being away from you if I don't have to be, especially not after what happened last week."

The attack already felt miles and years ago.

"When's the next appointment?" Rose asked.

"July. The school year ends on the seventeenth."

She nodded, her chin resting on his chest while she looked up at him. "I'll be there."

He held her gaze and the two stood there by the front door, completely oblivious to the rest of the house and world, taking comfort in each other's presence.

* * *

From: Marie Conta

To: Rosemarie Hathaway

Cc: HRM Vasilisa Dragomir

Date: April 10 at 4:52

Subject: Interviews

Guardian Hathaway,

Please begin submitting your interviews with the family. According to my records, I requested these be done several months ago.

Regards,

Princess Marie Conta

* * *

Easter, Rose was told, was everyone's favorite holiday. Its importance was on par with Christmas in America, or so was Karolina's impression when the two were walking home from the store the Friday before. Olena had run out of several key cake ingredients and needed them or the world was going to end, and according to Karolina, her mother was far from the only one panicking about getting ready for Easter.

Rose certainly saw it. The grocery store had cleared out two extra shelves just for eggs and most of them were gone by the time the pair arrived. That was Karolina's first stop and she made a beeline for them.

"I thought we already bought, like, five dozen the other day?" Rose asked, watching Karolina inspect and pull just as many from one of the shelves.

"Most of those went to decorating. A couple of people are coming over for lunch on Sunday and Mama wants enough to feed an army. So, we get more." Karolina rolled her eyes and then gave Rose an apologetic look as she deemed a carton unsuitable and put it back on the shelf. "Don't be surprised if she makes you help boil eggs all weekend, and _really_ don't be surprised if it feels like you eat nothing _but_ eggs for the next week."

"Warning noted," Rose said.

"What's going on with you and my brother?" Karolina asked, basketing a fifth carton and turning to face the one half-aisle that the rest of the dairy products had been shoved into. Her tone was light but Rose could see the other woman was dying from curiosity.

"What do you mean?" Rose asked.

Karolina considered the minimal block cheese selection with a sour look. "You two were really close in the winter and then you were really sad after he went back to the school and now you two are back and closer than ever." She picked one, some variation of cheese unfamiliar to Rose, and dumped three blocks of it in her basket. "I can only guess what's going on. You don't have to answer if you don't want to. It's your business. I just thought I'd ask since we're out of the house and away from prying ears."

"It's—" Rose stopped, head tilting in thought. "We're together. I think. We haven't really talked about it yet."

Karolina made a noise, one Rose had long come to understand meant acknowledgment of whatever had been said. "That's weird."

"What is?"

"That you haven't talked about your relationship yet. Dimka's usually the one pushing all those heavy conversations before you even know you're supposed to be having them."

"He hasn't said a word," Rose said.

They slid down the aisle as Rose spoke and Karolina grabbed a carton of milk, stepped away, the double-backed for a moment.

" _Viy deystvitelno dolzhny golovoy v oblakakh_?" Karolina asked, half to herself, as they turned the corner.

"What?" Rose asked, following Karolina down to the baking aisle. As far as she was aware, she'd gotten pretty good at understanding Russian, but Karolina's words made zero sense to her.

"I'm not sure what the English equivalent is. Knocked off his feet? I've heard the saying before, something about a course."

"Knocked off course?" Rose guessed after a few moments of trying to decipher what Karolina was saying.

"Yes!" Karolina turned into the baking aisle and grabbed a giant bag of sugar off the bottom shelf.

"What do you mean by that?" Rose repeated.

"He's always so serious," Karolina said, placing a finger on top of a bag of flour at waist-level and deliberating between it and another that was two shelves down. "Around you, he's not." She took the bag with her finger on it and turned to Rose. "It's obvious you've had an impact on him."

"I would say the same about him on me," Rose replied.

"You're serious about this, aren't you?" Karolina asked, her face as blank as Dimitri's when he wanted someone's unbiased opinion. "You and him."

"Yes," Rose said, maintaining eye contact.

Karolina studied her for nearly a full minute, making Rose wonder if she was under some kind of scrutiny test. "I would say he is, too," she said finally. "This said, if you play games like that other girl he dated a couple of years ago, I really have no qualms about punching you in the face."

"No games here," Rose said. She could appreciate a well-reasoned act of violence for someone screwing family members over. Avery Lazar's reconstructed nose was proof of as much.

"Good." Karolina had apparently decided she saw something in Rose she liked well enough to drop the subject and she led Rose to the front to pay for her basket.

* * *

"Miss Zoya," Rose called, sitting down next to the girl at the table later that night. They were the only two in the kitchen.

"Miss Rose," Zoya echoed. It was a greeting they had started doing after Rose had taught the girl forms of address. She was concentrating hard on carefully drawing stars on a dyed egg sitting in a stand, the look on her face an eerie replica of what Dimitri looked like whenever he was doing a chore Olena tasked him with.

"Do you want to practice colors?" Rose asked, half a beat slower than she usually spoke.

Zoya finished a star, her lip caught between her teeth, and then looked up and nodded. "Yes, I want to."

"What color is that?" Rose pointed to the green marker in Zoya's hand.

Zoya stared at the marker. Rose could practically see her thinking. "Green?"

"And the egg?" Rose pointed to the light blue egg Zoya was drawing stars on. She only responded to Zoya's answers if they were wrong.

"Black?"

"Blue. You were close." She tapped one of the dried eggs waiting to be finished decorating. "This one?"

They made their way across the couple dozen eggs on the table, Zoya growing more excited with every one she got right.

"What's your favorite color?" Rose asked towards the end, glancing up when she saw movement. Dimitri had slipped in during the course of their lesson and his shifting against the doorframe had caught her attention.

Zoya considered all the colors on the table. Rose had taught her a couple more advanced colors, and she pointed to an egg someone had decorated earlier, leaning forward on the table a little to stretch her short arm. "Turk-eez," she tried, making a face. "Did I get it right?"

"Turquoise," Rose corrected gently and Zoya nodded to herself, saying the word over a couple times to get the pronunciation right.

" _Para spat_ , Zoya," Dimitri said quietly from across the table. Zoya looked up, surprised by her uncle. " _Vasha mama imeyet istoriyu naverkh dlya vas_." _Time for bed, Zoya. Your mother is upstairs with a story for you._

" _Dolzhen li ya_?" Zoya whined and Dimitri nodded, moving around the table and picking her up off the chair. _Do I have to?_

He made her look at him with a tap on the bottom of her chin and replied with a serious voice. " _Baba Yaga pridet dlya vas, yesli vy ne delayete._ " _Baba Yaga will come for you if you don't._

That motivated her enough to acquiesce and wiggle out of his arms, darting up the stairs like the witch was knocking on the front door already. He watched her go, amusement on his face.

"You're good with her," he said, taking his niece's vacated seat.

"And you weren't here for the _long_ time it took for me to not freeze up around her every time she was in the same room as me," Rose said, reorganizing the eggs back into the order in which they had been sitting on the table. She was slow with only one working hand, her left arm frail from being immobile for a week, and Dimitri jumped in to help her. "You're better than I am with kids."

"I was raised in a house of half a dozen women and my first nephew was born when I was fifteen," Dimitri replied, still amused. "I've had a lot of exposure to motherly instincts."

"I have, like, negative exposure in comparison to you, then," Rose said dryly. "Lissa was my only female friend until I was eighteen. I'm fairly certain I would be a horrible mother."

"I sincerely doubt that," Dimitri said, recapping Zoya's marker and tucking it back in a cup that held the others. "I think everyone has the instincts to be a parent. Some people just need practice at it."

Rose shook her head, both in contradiction at his words and also to shake the mental image of Dimitri holding their child. "Doesn't matter anyway. I decided a long time ago that I don't want kids."

"You did?" His expression, when she looked, gave away nothing, but she could feel the tension that suddenly appeared in the air. This was the kind of thing people in long-term partnerships talked about, not undefined relationships that were barely two weeks old.

"Yeah, because I knew that if I ever had a child, I wouldn't be happy if I gave up my career to raise them, and I don't want to subject someone else to the childhood I had by my not giving up being a guardian. I was okay with my decision for a while but lately… I've been starting to think that everyone deserves a family like yours, one that's warm and happy and together. Not like mine — broken and fragmented and full of secrets." She didn't mention her original reasoning — not wanting to get involved with a Moroi again, not with the politics that came with it, nor was she ready to be in an open relationship with another dhampir, at least not until it was known that she could have a baby with someone from her own race.

Dimitri nodded slowly. "I understand that."

"You want kids, don't you?" Rose guessed, and something flickered across his face just visible enough to confirm her suspicions.

"If I had the opportunity, I wouldn't pass it up," Dimitri said diplomatically after a few seconds, not fully meeting her eyes. "But I wouldn't feel like I was missing something if I didn't. There was a moment when I was offered a chance to have a child, but I didn't go through with it. I wasn't in a good place to start something like that. Not that I'm particularly upset about that or anything. I'm sure the lot upstairs won't be the only nieces and nephews I get."

"Oh?" Rose asked, tucking a slippered foot under Dimitri's leg.

His hand found her ankle almost immediately in response. "Sonya, probably, will have another one or two," he mused. "I don't think she'd be happy with just Katya. And definitely Vika. I hate to stereotype my own family, but she…"

 _Is a blood whore?_ Rose mentally finished, thinking back to her one wild night with Viktoria at Temno back in the winter.

"There are certain personality types that follow certain paths in life," he continued, sounding like he was trying his absolute hardest to only speak positively of his sister. "Vika has made some choices that conflict with what Sonya and Karo have done with their lives."

"What about Karolina?" Rose asked softly in an effort to steer the conversation back to safer water.

"I don't think she's going to have any more children," Dimitri said with a heavy sigh. "I would guess that between Paul and Zoya and now her marrying Sasha, she's done. Around here, once a dhampir woman marries, she usually doesn't get pregnant again because she often marries a dhampir man."

Declan, of all people, crossed her mind. He was almost four, though by Sydney and Adrian's fudged numbers, those who knew of him were under the belief he was roughly six months younger. His birth parents had both been dhampirs and after his birth mother was murdered by Strigoi, his birth father, Neil Raymond, a guardian who was only in contact with Eddie, had more or less dumped Declan on Sydney and Adrian, asking them to raise in him in secret as their own so that no one would find out how exactly he came to be. He'd been jumping between grandmothers over the past year after Adrian's meds had stopped working and he suffered relapses in his spirit-driven vices. Last Rose had heard, Declan was with Sydney's mother with the goal that he'd be back with Sydney and Adrian in time to start pre-school in the fall.

Something in her burned to tell Dimitri that he and his sister could have kids if they wanted, that there was a way involving charmed tattoos and a suspended belief in what they'd spent over thirty years knowing, but she kept her mouth shut. It wasn't her secret to share, much as she wanted to.

(What did that say about her, that she wanted to reassure Dimitri he could have kids with another dhampir when _she_ , a dhampir herself, was the woman he once mentioned loving?)

"Lissa and Christian plan on having, like, six kids," Rose said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. "I told them in high school that I was perfectly fine with being Cool Aunt Rose and spoiling their asses with all the stuff their parents would say no to."

Dimitri laughed, some of the tension evaporating. He squeezed her ankle, his fingers setting her leg on fire. "I can see that. When they become bratty teenagers, they'll threaten to move in with you because your place is so much more fun."

"Hey—" Sonya, who'd suddenly appeared, stopped halfway into the kitchen. "Oh, sorry, I thought everyone had gone to bed."

Rose waved her off, neither her nor Dimitri making any effort to move. "We're just talking."

"Seemed pretty intense for just talking," Sonya drawled with a sardonic smile and then she slapped a hand over her mouth. "Shit, I did _not_ mean to say that out loud."

"Okay, Vika," Dimitri teased. His fingers had started tracing the outside jut of Rose's ankle bone, and she barely stopped herself from sucking in a breath. She was suddenly really aware that she had gotten her cast and sling taken off for good earlier that day.

Sonya was flushed and Dimitri laughed at that. "We'll clean this up," he said placatingly. "Rose and I have been doing the least around here for Easter preparations."

 _We. Rose and I._ Her stomach was jelly by now and his damn fingers hadn't stopped, feather light against her skin and pulling all her focus on that small bit of connection. She was turned on and zoned out, not fully registering Dimitri and Sonya's conversation.

"Rose."

She looked up from where she'd been staring at his hand on her ankle, blinking hard. Sonya was gone. "What?"

"You were on another planet just now."

She swallowed. "Your hand is really distracting."

His fingers skipped a beat and his eyes darkened, hunger flashing through them. "How so?"

"You know how so," she said, surprised she was able to fully articulate her words at all.

He hummed, using his grip on her ankle to slide her closer. She slipped her foot free, her leg curled up against her for the briefest of moments before he pulled it over his lap, the rest of her following with the motion instinctively. Faced away from him, her breath hitched when she felt him push her hair to one side.

"I don't think I do," he murmured, trailing kisses down the back of her neck and sending her head spinning with delirium. He gripped her hips tight, and she linked one of her hands on top of his, the other bracing herself against the table.

"Don't be coy," she said feverishly, torn between swimming in heady arousal and letting her impatience for him to get the show on the road take route despite barely being touched. "You know exactly what you're doing."

He wrapped his free hand around her waist, bringing her with him when he sat back in the chair, the creak of worn wood loud in the otherwise silent room. The thought that anyone could walk in, like Sonya had earlier, only spurred Rose on, and she suspected Dimitri felt the same way. The hand she'd gripped the table with shot up to tangle in his hair; she played off the twinge in her shoulder as a reaction to his hands on her, a wet gasp falling from her lips.

"You sound really sure of yourself," he said in her ear, untangling his fingers and undoing her the button on her jeans. Her hold on his arm was feeble, her wrist weak like her shoulder. She turned into him as he slowly slid the zipper down, and he covered her loud whimper with a deep, hungry kiss.

* * *

The following morning, Rose half choked on her oatmeal when Viktoria sat down in The Chair. Sonya gave her and Dimitri a curious look that morphed into one of realization as soon as Rose turned to Alex and struck up an inane conversation about the weather to distract herself.


	3. Chapter Three

I'M BACK.

Long story short, this summer (and year, to be honest) has been a clusterfuck in regards to my health, but things are under control and I'm here with more fic! This one is a shortie but a goodie; next chapter we'll be back to our regular length, which includes one of the first original ideas I had for this verse that has survived all the way to posting. No promises on when it will be up, but it definitely won't be almost two months again!

* * *

APR 11 (SAT)

Belikova S.R.

 _English Version_

[ … ]

Job/career? (Q2.1)

 _Pharmacist_

Is [job] what you've always wanted to do? When did you know? (Q2.2, Q2.4)

 _Yes, since [I was] about 11 years old._

Why? (Q2.3)

 _Out of all four children, I was the the only one who found my mother's work as a healer interesting. For me, I ended up being more interested in the science behind it than the interpersonal connections. It helped that mathematics and chemistry were my best subjects in school._

Did you at any point consider becoming a guardian? (Q2.5)

 _Briefly._

When? (Q2.6)

 _When [my brother] completed his trials and entered the field._

Why did you not go through with it? (Q2.7a)

 _It seemed [like] a passing fancy. Also, because I was born at [sic] the right year, I was able to leave school after grade nine if I wanted. [Education through grade 11 became compulsory in 2007, five years later.] My exam scores were adequate enough to gain my acceptance at [the] Irkutsk Pharmacy Institute, so I opted to leave [school] at 15 and go there instead. My mother was initially worried about [my] being alone in a distant city at such a young age, but Dimitri being placed [in Irkutsk with his charge] helped her nerves._

Do you wish you'd done anything differently? (Q2.8)

 _Sometimes I wish I had stayed [in school] for the two more years [since grades 10 and 11 were optional at the time]. I would have been able to go to university [had I done that] and have a higher pay. I don't have any regrets about how I did things, however._

[ … ]

What do you hope for your [child(ren)] in the future? (Q3.6)

 _Happiness, health, and love._

Do you wish anything for your [child(ren)]? (Q3.7)

 _To do better than me. To know their father. More likely not for Katya, but others in the future…I want them to have a proper_ otchestvo _[patronymic] and be proud of it and to know whom it came from._

[ … ]

Do you think dhampirs are treated fairly in our society? (Q6.2)

 _If [I thought] yes, I would be living in a much different place._

[Elaborate.] (QI.3)

 _I will most likely live in Baia until I am a very old woman, like my grandmother. Sometimes, I wish I could live elsewhere — Novosibirsk or Omsk or maybe Smolensk — but I am too poor to move. We all are. We are taught from a young age to have pride [in being from Baia] because our family has been here for several generations. There's a lot of history tying our family here, they tell us. But one day, you grow up — for me, I believe I was about 20 or so — and you realize it was all a lie. We have to be proud of [where we come from] because it's the only history and culture we have, and if you don't [have pride], then you have nothing. It gives us an identity that is more than just being trapped in a tourist destination._

[ … ]

* * *

"We have to talk," Rose said, cornering Dimitri shaving in the bathroom the night after Zoya and the Easter eggs.

He paused halfway through dragging his razor over his jaw and raised an eyebrow. "About?"

"Us." She closed the door and leaned against it, angling her hips out towards him a little farther than maybe necessary for the conversation.

Her posture didn't go unnoticed by him. "I did say that, didn't I?" he asked as he resumed shaving after his eyes blazed a trail up her legs. Despite his heat, he sounded like he'd rather talk about almost anything else.

"You did."

Silence.

"So," she started and when he opened his mouth to respond, she added, "If you repeat me, you better remember you're holding several sharp blades against your throat."

He made a noise that sounded a cross between distressed and something she couldn't name. "That should not be as enticing as you make it sound."

Grinning, she shrugged. "It's a talent."

He shook his razor out in the skinful of water with a small smile and she watched, enraptured by the slide of the razor against his skin. She knew the skin would be baby soft when he finished. "This is a very enlightening conversation," he quipped when she hadn't said anything after a few moments.

"You're distracting," she said.

"You said that last night," he said when he met her eyes in the mirror, his tone fully remembering what had happened afterwards. They'd cleaned up — or, rather, _he_ had cleaned up the decorating mess, arranging the eggs for the morning while she watched from his chair, boneless and admiring the way he moved — and while they'd gone up to bed immediately after, it was another couple of hours until they actually went to sleep.

"We, um—" she said, clearing her throat and trying not fall any more off topic. "There _is_ a 'we', right?"

"If there isn't, then I'd need a very good explanation for how I feel about you," he replied.

Her body, already loose and thrumming in his presence, jerked and she saw his eyes flick down to the movement.

"So, like . . . I know it sounds juvenile, like we're in high school or something . . ."

"If you want to change your Facebook status to 'in a relationship', I would definitely not complain." He swiped one last time as his neck, giving the razor a thorough rinse in the water before pulling the plug in the sink.

 _I can't, not with Lissa able to see it._ "So I can pimp you out as my boyfriend, then."

"Roza." His laugh was loud, amused, and she grinned at it. "I'd prefer not to be pimped out."

"I would never," she promised, hoisting herself to sit on the tiny, empty strip of bathroom counter as he washed the last remnants of shaving cream off his face and neck. "I don't share well," she added. "I never learned how. Hazard of growing up an only child."

He reached for the hand towel hanging from the wall on the other side of her. It was a small bathroom, all things considered; the move put him directly in her space. "Good," he said, drying off his face. And then, purposely pushing himself as close to her as possible, her legs opening up to accommodate him without a word, he reached behind her for his aftershave where it was crammed to the side amidst his sisters' perfumes. "Because I don't want to share you with anyone, either," he said as he dabbed a small amount on and set the glass bottle back down on the counter, front and center.

She leaned in the last inches between them, wrapping her arms around his neck and inhaling deeply. "I love that smell on you," she said, nosing his jawline. The skin was just as soft as she had guessed it would be. "It's comforting. I know you're near when I smell it." Her words sent a dark thrill down her. It was one thing to think something; there was something infinitely more powerful about saying her thoughts aloud. She'd never really been in a position to say those kinds of things to someone.

Instead of answering her, he kissed her, his hands warm and large on her back, and she wrapped her legs around his hips, wanting him as close as possible. They stayed like that for a while, Rose struck by how nice it was to just make out with a guy who didn't expect anything more, the first time for her in a while, and a loud knock broke them apart, more time having passed than either realized.

Viktoria's voice floated through the door. "Babushka says if you keep going at it like the animals you guys clearly are, not even Jesus himself will be able to help you at church tomorrow. Also, dinner's ready."

They waited until her footsteps faded away before anyone spoke.

"I'm fairly certain my grandmother didn't say that," Dimitri murmured, rolling his eyes, and Rose couldn't help but laugh, her head falling to his chest and his arms tightening around her.

 _God, I love him._

The realization hit her hard. It would've knocked her over if she hadn't already been in his embrace. She wanted to speak, say something in response to him about him, but those three little words seemed like the only thing that truly expressed how she felt sitting on a bathroom counter making out with a man who was just as crazy about her as she was about him.

"We should go," he said, his soft, rare, private smile only she saw out in full force. It was the one that said anything she felt was exactly what he felt, too.

"I don't want to," she replied quietly, meaning every word.

"I know." He ran his hands along her arms, resting at the curve of her elbows. His accent was more pronounced, the only sign she was affecting him as much as she was. "Would it help if I mentioned that I intend on taking advantage of you now that you're back to full mobility?"

"I thought you did that last night," Rose whispered, flashes of which were quickly turning her on.

"Last night, tonight, tomorrow night…" He kissed her deeply. "Every night I'm with you, to be perfectly honest."

"I could be up for that," she said, smiling into the next kiss. "In fact, I'm probably going to hold you to that."

He groaned against her mouth and then pulled away, opening the door. "My sister's right. Not even God Himself can save me from you, Rose Hathaway."

* * *

Church and Rose Hathaway were a combination that never really got along. Her most consistent source of religion was Lissa, and Rose had only infrequently attended services at St. Vladimir's with her best friend. When they got to middle school, it became more of a social opportunity than anything else, though by the time Rose hit novice status, she was, more often than not, too hungover to think about getting out bed. And as far her religious beliefs went, she slapped the Agnostic label over everything to call it a day because she'd never really sat down to figure it all out. If someone pressed her for details, she'd say that if there was a God, whatever master plan He had was pretty sick and twisted to let all the suffering in the world go on, tests of personal strength be damned.

Sleeping in on Easter wasn't an option. Olena and Yeva were up with the sun, throwing open windows and pulling everyone out of bed with sharp, insistent knocks on doors. Rose and Dimitri were one of the last ones to be woken; she could faintly hear movement in neighboring rooms.

When a second round of knocks came around — Yeva, Rose was pretty sure, giving one final warning before she started barging in — Dimitri rolled over, groaning loudly into his pillow.

"Tired, comrade?"

" _Nyet_."

She grinned, sitting up and leaning over to kiss his bare shoulder. "Your fault. C'mon."

Dimitri groaned again when he rolled onto his back, covers bunched at his waist. He knocked an eye open, watching Rose get dressed appreciatively, tucking a pale yellow lace blouse into a dark purple skirt — Viktoria's gift shopping trip back in January now finally useful to Rose — as her hair fell into her face when she looked down to make sure nothing was bunched up awkwardly. She turned to the full-length mirror hanging on the back of the door, tugging at the skirt.

"You look gorgeous." His voice was a soft rumble across the small room.

She relaxed, her hands letting go of the fabric. "I'm not used to skirts and colors. I mean, not recently. I was into this stuff when I was younger, but I gave it up when I graduated." She picked at her blouse, pulling it out a smidge to even it out and give her a little room to breathe. "Jeans and t-shirts are more practical, you know?"

"I do." She turned to see him sitting up, hands resting in his lap as he gazed at her. "I like those on you. I like that—" He nodded at her outfit. "—On you. Whatever you wear, you always look beautiful."

"Yeah?" Her smile was sweetened by the pleasant feelings stirred up in her. Guys had always called her _hot_ or _sexy_ and Adrian had used _pretty_ the handful of times he hadn't been trying to get her naked, but nobody had ever called her _beautiful_.

She decided she could spend the rest of her life hearing Dimitri verbally worship her.

His look said she was being ridiculous. "Rose, you could wear a potato sack, and I wouldn't want you any less."

Leaning against the wall where the closet jutted out in an attempt to cover up how his words affected her, she smirked, her eyes flicking around his body. "If you're trying to lure me back into bed, comrade, it's not gonna work."

"Who said I was?" he teased, looking for all the world like he was.

"Get dressed," she said, running a hand through her hair, shaking it out. She was going to need to run a brush through her hair before facing the world downstairs.

"Where's Dimitri?" Olena asked when Rose slipped in the kitchen to swipe bread for the pair of them. She was in the middle of last minute baking amid the chaos of a dozen people trying to get ready for church and the stress from the situation was clear on her face.

"Waking up." She set the tub of butter down and caught Zoya before the girl could run into the open fridge door she was headed straight for and turned her upside down, talking over the elated shrieks. "He's too heavy for me to drag out of bed."

Katya, following her older cousin, came to a stop next to Rose and started holding her hands up, a universal sign for Rose to do the same with her as she was with Zoya. Rose flipped Zoya over and righted her on the floor before swinging Katya up into her arms, deliberately ignoring the twinge in her shoulder at all the sudden movement and weightlifting.

"Mama, have you seen—There you are." Karolina swept in, Paul behind her, and picked up Zoya a lot less happily than Rose had. " _You_ need to be dressed."

"No, I don't," Zoya countered.

"Yes, you do." Karolina huffed. "I regret asking Rose to teach you English," she said, carrying her daughter out of the room and upstairs. "Now you talk back in two languages."

Paul had wandered over to Rose, stealing the butter knife from her. "My mother keeps complaining that my sister turned sixteen instead of six."

"That would make her the same age as you," Rose teased, tearing off a hunk of bread and grinning at Paul's horrified expression.

"I don't want to be anywhere near her when she's actually sixteen," he muttered, and Rose just laughed.

* * *

"Here," Sonya said to Rose outside the church in downtown Baia, handing Rose a slip of silk. "For your head," she added, gesturing to the scarf loosely wrapped around her own head.

"Is this an Easter thing?" Rose asked.

"For you, it is," Sonya replied, sighing heavily as Katya started fighting her mother about the headscarf Sonya was trying to get on.

Karolina, closer to the front of the group of them in line to enter the church, handed Zoya off to Alex and waved her sister to the side, kneeling in front of Katya.

"Why don't you want to put your _platok_ on, Katyushka?"

"Because."

"That's not a reason, _malyshka_."

"But I don't want to wear it."

"Zoya is wearing hers. Do you want to be an older girl like Zoya?"

Katya levelled her aunt a look. "I'm four."

Biting back a laugh, Rose crouched down next to Karolina and tugged gently on Katya's scarf where it had fallen onto her shoulders. "I don't know how to put mine on. Why don't you show me how to do it?"

For a few moments, Katya blankly stared at Rose, who gave her an encouraging smile. Katya rolled her eyes in response before saying, "I guess. Here. This part goes on your head like this…"

When Rose straightened a few minutes later and returned to Dimitri's side, he just grinned down at her.

* * *

In the act of "writing culture," what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary — but also deeply felt and personal — record of human lives based on eyewitness and testimony.… So-called participant observation has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all.…

— Nancy Scheper-Hughes, _Death Without Weeping_ (1989)

* * *

"You guys do this old-school, don't you?" Rose murmured appreciatively to Dimitri once the family was inside. The church itself was small but gorgeous, with icons and biblical artwork lining the walls, a priest and a choir taking turns singing and chanting, and people quietly milling about, worshipping and praying in so many variations that Rose probably could've stood off to the side and not stuck out. Everything was gilded in gold, and while she'd been to the church several times before, Easter brought a special current of wishfulness that made the building feel like magic.

"As much as possible. If Strigoi didn't pose such a great threat, we would have our service at nightfall as all the human churches do." He nodded in reverence to an icon of some saint that Rose assumed had to have been long dead by now, but didn't stop. "And while the church is untouchable by them, we worry about getting to and from our homes. There's a folk story based on that, actually."

"Really?"

"Mhm. The reason we do what you would call Easter service at nightfall is because it was believed for a long time that there were creatures in the dark who would prey upon those attempting to celebrate the day, and if you got to the church before the sun disappeared, you would be safe to worship. Centuries ago, the service would last until sunrise because the creatures can't harm you in daylight. Now, though, they last a couple hours at most, but everyone still stays up all night because most have been fasting for the past forty days."

Rose snorted. "It's like the Alchemists weren't even trying with that one."

"Hey," Dimitri chided softly, slowing in front of two icons tucked into one of the church's corners. "We survived in medieval Russia just fine before the Alchemists showed up. Don't go giving them all the credit."

She playfully scrunched her face up, but her mood dropped upon seeing the icons Dimitri had stopped them in front of. To the left was Saint Vladimir, the namesake of her school, and Saint Basil to the right. They were flat paintings with very little dimension and colors darkened from age; they were facing each other, almost as if the arrangement had been planned, and in the candlelight, they looked as if they were whispering to each other.

"Are you okay?" Dimitri asked.

She didn't respond, and when he squeezed her hand a few moments later, she shook her head. "Yeah, I'm fine."

"Where did you go?"

"Hmm? Oh, nowhere, I just… They make it look so easy, you know? Just giving everything up and devoting themselves to their cause like it's no big deal. I mean, I know they made a lot of sacrifices and that neither had it easy in life, but it's hard to remember that."

"You know a lot about Saint Vladimir, yes?"

She shrugged. "I guess. Lissa and I read a lot of his stuff when we were trying to figure out her magic. He was happiest with Anna, but that's not the best example for someone like you or me. We'll always have to choose." At Dimitri's confused expression, she clarified. "What I mean is that I can either have you, but potentially not the career I want, or I can definitely have the career I want, but I'd more than likely have to leave you behind, you see?"

"That's…an interesting interpretation."

"What do you mean?"

"Sasha and Karo, for one example."

"Yeah, but is Alex truly happy with doing what he does? See? You can't even agree with me on that because you know as much as I do that he hates it."

"Hate is a strong word."

"How else would you describe your thoughts and feelings on serving drinks to drugged up girls every night?"

Dimitri nodded. "True." Then, after a few seconds of silence: "Do you think you could do it? Give up everything of one thing for another?"

"I don't know." Rose's gaze was firmly planted on the ancient paintings in front of her, but she could feel Dimitri watching her. "I know you make me happy and I know my life has been forever changed because you've been in it, no matter how long, but…"

 _This isn't my reality._

"I don't know," she continued. "It depends on a lot of things. But if I had to go back to Court and make a decision today…I think I'd pick you."

Next to her, Dimitri audibly swallowed. "Really?"

Saying the words out loud made Rose a little bit more confident in them. "Yeah, I think so. I don't need to be Lissa's guardian to be her friend or to stay in her life, but I honestly can't imagine you not there with me."

All Dimitri responded with was pulling Rose into him and holding her close until her fingers went numb from gripping his shirt.


	4. Chapter Four

In research, anthropologists' [sic] paramount responsibility is to those they study. When there is a conflict of interest, these individuals must come first. Anthropologists must do everything in their power to protect the physical, social and psychological welfare and to honor the dignity and privacy of those studied.

— American Anthropological Association, _Code of Professional Ethics_ (1983)

* * *

The last night of St. Basil's extended Easter holiday, Rose returned from her shower to find Dimitri packing in their room and, God help her, _singing along_ to the obnoxious 80s music blaring out of a boombox she'd only ever seen stored in the attic. Clad in leggings and a t-shirt she'd stolen from Dimitri and wringing the excess water from her hair with her towel, she cautiously took a seat next to his large duffel on the bed, an unsure expression on her face.

After a minute of watching him, she finally asked over the music, "What on Earth are you doing?"

Finally recognizing that she was in the room, he hurriedly turned down the music but didn't look at all ashamed that she'd found him like this.

"You know," she said, handing him the towel so he could hang it on the room's door handle, "I'm starting to think you've only heard of Prince and Madonna after being trapped out here for thirty years."

"Not true," he countered, flashing her a teasing smile. "There's also some king of music? Matthew Jackson? Michael Johnson? You know who I'm talking about, right?"

"You're ridiculous," she said. ( _I love you_ , she thought.) "You know the Iron Curtain fell, right? Like, twenty-five years ago? You're allowed to listen to music from this millennium. The greatest hits of the USSR is old news, comrade."

"I'm aware, Roza," he laughed. "I was there."

The thought struck her with realization. She knew, factually, that he'd been born in the Soviet Union, and while she never really noticed their age difference — the gap between 23 and 30 wasn't as wide as, say, 17 and 24 — it hadn't really hit her until that moment that he'd witnessed events she'd only learned about in school. It was impossible to imagine him living before she was born.

"Do you remember it?" she asked, idly playing with one of the duffel's zippers. "The dissolution, I mean."

He considered the question, head tilted as he folded a shirt from the basket of clean laundry Sonya had dropped off earlier. "Bits and pieces. I was young when it all happened. Some of the blocs were demanding independence when I was barely out of infancy. I do remember when Gorbachev was kidnapped. It was a couple weeks before I started school and my mother got really nervous about sending me off to the Academy with all the protests going on. I didn't grasp what was going on, but I do remember not seeing my father at all for a couple years while everything collapsed and thinking that was a big relief."

He dropped the shirt on top of the others in the bag and reached for another. His gaze was off center, lost in thought. "I don't remember the election in ninety-one, but I do know from Karo that my mother and grandmother were excited about voting for the President. My starkest memory, though, was watching Gorbachev resign. My grandmother pulled all of us out of bed and sat all of us down in front of the television. Some of her friends and our neighbors were over as well." He paused, folded shirt in his hands. "When it was over, my grandmother looked at my mother and said ' _zdes konets_ '. ' _This is the end._ ' And my mother looked at my sisters and me and said to my grandmother, in English, 'they will reissue passports in the future, then'."

"Why did she say that?" Rose asked, voice soft.

He opened his mouth, shut it, and then put the second shirt in his bag. "I'll be right back." He left the room for a few minutes and came back with a couple of official-looking documents.

"What's this?" she asked when he perched on the edge of the bed next to her.

"This," he said, "Is my birth certificate."

It was stock paper the size of a passport folded in half, old and worn on the edges but otherwise in pristine condition. The pen ink had faded slightly from thirty years of exposure to the air. The writing looked like a bunch of scribbles and humps looped together; while she'd gotten pretty good at reading Russian print, she'd never managed to figure out cursive. For the most part, though, she could guess what it said. Some of it wasn't surprising — born on November 26, 1984 in Novosibirsk Oblast with Olena listed as his mother — but other stuff caught her eye.

"You don't have a father listed."

He shook his head. "My parents never married, so legally speaking, my mother was single, and it was fairly standard practice to not list the father in those situations. He could've taken her to court about putting his name on and he threatened that a couple times later in their relationship, when she would make it clear she didn't want him in our lives, but he never went through with it." He leaned in close, his arm braced against the bed behind her back and his chin nearly resting on her shoulder despite the height difference. "I don't want his name on it anyway. I might be his in a biological sense, but that's it."

The bitterness in his voice at a man he couldn't care less for didn't go unnoticed by Rose. She pointed to the other item she hadn't expected. "That's not the patronymic I've heard people use." Patronymics were the Russian equivalents of middle names, based on the father's name, and were used with someone's given name as standard practice. Dropping the given name or patronymic to use only one of them was a sign of familiarity and intimacy. From what she could make out, the name read _Randalovich_ , and she knew she'd heard something similar but not quite.

Dimitri nodded. "Single mothers gave their children their own name, at least when my sisters and I were born, but my father was dead set on making sure we knew we were his. Sober, I don't think he cared one way or another, and I got the sense some visits were almost obligatory for him, that he was irritated at having us attached to him but that he came back out of some kind of twisted feeling of duty to us. But what I ]remembered most about him was that he was drunk more often than not and easily angered, and he had a tendency to get really… possessive, I would say. When Karo was born, my mother was set on using her father's name, but my father… bullied her, I guess you would say, into using his name, even though it's not Russian." His tone said he was being overly nice in his choice of words.

"Regardless, he made it clear she had to do the same for any other children. I didn't think of anything about it growing up — I got some weird looks for a clearly American name — but a couple weeks after his . . . last visit, Karo asked my mother if she could change her patronymic. Not legally, at least not until she turned eighteen… my mother, as subdued as she was at the time, was enthusiastic about it. I jumped on board with it. I remember lying in this room — same bed, different sheets — surrounded by baby books with my sister one weekend as we debated endless names, saying them out loud and writing them down to see how it would sound and look. It was freeing, like we were shedding the last of him from our lives."

"And you guys settled on . . ." Rose trailed off, unsure how to separate the name from the ending in his current patronymic.

"Radul. It was close enough to Randall that it didn't sound too different and for as much of a fucking _asshole_ as he was—" Rose looked up sharply at the venom in Dimitri's tone and she saw him catch sight of her reaction and swallow back the anger. "—We wouldn't exist without him. It felt wrong to pick some random name. We considered using our grandfather's name, Oleg, but neither of us was really into it. I found it, actually, Radul. It means 'hope' and 'joy', which I thought was fitting. It's Serbian, technically, but it's better than what we had originally." He laughed at some memory then. "Karo and I celebrated each other's eighteenth birthdays by driving the other into the city to the courthouse to change our names. We would've done it sooner, but it meant getting permission from both of our parents, and we knew that would never happen."

"Did Sonya and Viktoria change theirs?" she asked, still looking at him. Her chest was heavy with the gravity of his stories. It sounded like this was the first time he'd ever told them aloud.

"Sonya did, right before Katya was born, because she was going to use hers for Katya's name and didn't want Katya to be burdened with her grandfather's name. As far as Viktoria… I don't think she ever did. I would imagine she sees no reason to. Plenty of her friends have names of fathers they hardly know, if they even know them. It was different for the rest of us. We were older. We saw what he was like, what he did, and we remember."

Rose brushed her lips against the corner of Dimitri's mouth as she squeezed his leg where her hand had come to rest on his inner thigh just above his knee, a silent show of support. His last words — _we remember_ — were so weighted, she thought it might crush the both of them.

"I've… struggled," he said when she leaned her forehead against his temple, her hair brushing his, and he reached up with his free hand to tuck it behind her ear, his hand resting against her neck and his thumb stroking her jawline. "I was always a pretty serious student. Kind of a nerd, too." She shared his self-deprecating laugh, turning her head to rest against his shoulder.

"I bet you were one of those quiet ones you only ever really saw in class or at meals."

"Sometimes. I was fairly social when I wanted to be. I always had friends. Some were siblings of my sisters' friends. Most were novices. I think I had two or three Moroi friends, and Ivan was definitely the closest, and I didn't even properly meet Ivan until we were seventeen. I knew of him and who he was, but it wasn't until our final year that we actually had a class together. It was a survey of English literature, in the original old English. We were two of seven students and the only boys. He was my field experience assignment, actually, now that I'm thinking about it. I don't know. We just clicked over taking that suicide mission of a class." Dimitri paused, remembering something, and gave a humorless laugh. "I met Anton in year five when I knocked out some kid who was picking on him for having holes in his jeans. I knew who he was before then because we were both from here, but we'd never talked to each other until then. We'd just come back from summer break and my father had visited… I was ten and worked up about a lot of things."

"I pushed Dawn Yarrow into a tree in the ninth grade and broke her arm in three places," Rose offered, smiling at his carefree laugh in response to her small piece of history. "I like to think that story's become a legend and gets passed around at campfires late at night. I certainly earned a lot of respect for it, as awful as that sounds."

"Knowing you, I'm sure it'll be published in history textbooks," he said. She elbowed him lightly and he laughed again. She decided, probably not for the first time in her life, that she was willing to do or say pretty much anything to hear him laugh. The sound — rich, warm, clear — faded as he sobered a little.

"That anger, though…" His mouth twisted. "It was always there. I've worked very hard to keep it under control. Training in school gave me a way to direct that energy in a healthy way. I have friends and people who like and respect me, but those interactions were always shallow at best. Holding doors open and helping my grandmother's friends out of their cars at church doesn't allow for a whole lot of depth between people, not compared to what you experience living with someone. I always did my best to be patient and calm with my mother, but I wasn't alway successful. I'm sure my sisters have told you stories."

"I've heard some stuff," she admitted. "Nothing in detail."

He nodded, his cheek against the crown of her head. "My worst, I would argue, was right after I ended my last relationship." Her heart tugged with useless jealousy over a woman before her, but she tangled her fingers with his to urge him on. "I gave more than she ever did and I was much more invested than she was. She started arguments and fights constantly as though she couldn't function without them, but that's the story of most Moroi women in my experience."

His exhale was long, slow and harsh as his chest fell. "We were together for a while. Long enough that I actually moved with her out west, to Moscow, and was considering becoming her guardian, just so I could come off my bereavement leave. I don't think she cared, though. She ripped me apart from the inside out and scattered the pieces to the wind with a smile on her face. We couldn't get here for New Year's — she had a work function, if I remember correctly, and had guilted me into staying in the city to go with her — and that was the night I left. A neighbor had called the police because the shouting was loud enough to worry them, and she left right after the officers drove away, too pissed at me for whatever reason she came up with that day. I couldn't take it. I grabbed a backpack, the first bag I could put my hands on, and shoved in the essentials. I left everything else I owned — important stuff like photos and favorite shirts and every book Ivan had ever bought me as a gift — and bought a ticket for the next train out, despite the holiday. I rode to Barabinsk and called my mother from a payphone, crying. That winter…" The look in his eyes was far away, trapped in an awful memory of abuse. "It was a hard winter. My mother kicked me out at one point because I was acting so out of line."

Rose was silent for a moment, processing the story. That was definitely not something he'd ever told anyone before. The distant quality in his voice said as much. Something slid in place suddenly and she twisted to face him fully, her hands framing his face gently and pushing just enough to get him to look at her.

"Thank you," she said quietly, voice low with emotion. His eyes were wet and she hurt with the need to put a smile back on his face. "For sharing that with me. I… I can't begin to imagine the pain you went through." He sat up, his fingers wrapping around her wrists with such tenderness that she thought they might fuse into his touch. "But you're here, now, with me, and I could never dream of treating you like that."

"I know," he whispered, his expression scared that she might disappear if he let go. "I entrusted you with my heart a long time ago."

"And I haven't let you down with it, have I?" she asked, voice tremulous with the light joke as she tried to cover up how much she felt ready to fly apart so he could stitch her back together. She was surprised at how put-together she sounded to her own ears.

 _He needs you right now. His soul is laid out for you to see._

"No, Roza, you haven't." His laugh was nearly breathless in its softness. "I don't think you ever could." Her hands moved to the back of his head, winding through his hair, and he slid his grip down to hang in the crooks of her elbows, visibly drawing strength from her. "I wasn't sure how to feel about you coming when I found out — this stranger, a friend of the Queen's, coming to live in my house with my family, asking questions about my people… ultimately, I decided I didn't have much say in it. I was away at work and I knew my mother could handle the situation if it didn't work out. But that night, last December, when you defended yourself, marking a space as yours despite you having every right to lay low… I was struck by everything about you. You'd only been here two months, but I knew some part of you cared for my family. I could relax because I knew they were in good hands with you. That night… it hadn't even been a full year since I walked away from the worst situation I've ever experienced, but I met you and I finally felt safe for the first time in my life."

She had no idea what that felt like, to never feel safe. She'd only had lapses in her sense of security — the car accident taking the closest thing to a surrogate family she had in Lissa's parents and brother, when she and Lissa ran away from the academy, the attack and losing Mason, the month she spent on the road with Adrian and Mikhail Tanner after breaking her out of jail so that she could find Lissa's hidden half-sibling — but for the most part, feeling guarded and paranoid were the exception, not the rule. There may not have been as much family and love in Rose's childhood as there was in Dimitri's, but she'd been privileged with the ability to fall asleep every night not having to worry about the consequences of someone else's mood swings or if they'd have enough money to keep the electricity on.

"I'm glad you can find that in me," Rose said, meaning every word. "It's not the same, I know, but when I'm with you… it's like the world can't touch me."

Dimitri shook his head. "It doesn't need to be exactly the same. We're different people, even with our similarities. Things would quickly get boring if everything was the same."

"Between your music and your lack of variation in wardrobe, I'm pretty sure you enjoy boring."

The air broke and she watched as he pulled one last deep breath, the tension melting out of his body as his private smile for her broke across his face. "You're all the variety I need in this life and the next, Roza."

"Good," she said, kissing him softly. "It's not the full Rose Hathaway experience if I have to tone things down."

He laughed and kissed her again, deepening it until her toes curled. "As much," he said, in between lighter kisses, unable to help himself and spurred on by Rose's eager responses, "As I would love—" Lips against her forehead. "—To see you—" Nose brushing in her hairline, inhaling her clean scent. "—Not—" A kiss dropped to her temple. "—Tone yourself down—" Earlobe nipped, then kissed to soothe. "—I have to finish packing."

"Lame," she muttered and then, without warning, she tugged on his hair and then extracted herself from his arms, taking her original spot and feeling cold from no longer being in his space. She had to close her eyes to center herself or else she'd jump him and distract him from packing for the rest of the night. The bed shifted when he stood and circled back around to the foot of the bed, and she noticed the movement distantly, a thousand miles away as she pulled herself together.

"Are you okay?" he asked and her head jerked up, eyes wide.

"Yeah, I'm fine." _Just really fucking turned on by the very thought of you._ She spotted the other small booklets he'd brought in earlier, tucked underneath the corner of his bag where she'd put his birth certificate so it didn't accidentally get crushed. "What're those?"

It took him half a beat to follow her thought path. "Some other stuff I thought you might be interested in. The top one is my mother's old _propiska_ , when she lived in Novosibirsk for a few years with one of her sisters. My grandmother wasn't aware of what was going on with my father at the time, and my mother didn't want to tell her, so one of my aunts took her in from eighty-two to eighty-six? Eighty-seven? It's a long story I don't have the energy to tell right now, but we came back when my grandmother started paying attention and demanded my mother be back under the same roof as her so she could keep an eye on my father. Not that it slowed him down."

"This?" she asked, filing the story away for later and holding up a light crimson booklet. The cover was self-explanatory, but he so rarely discussed his early childhood, she wanted to hear him talk about it as much as possible.

"My mother's old internal passport." Inside, Rose saw an old photograph of Olena. If the issue date hadn't been 1980, she would've sworn she was looking at a young Sonya. "She would've never been able to get an international passport at the time, so she didn't have one of those. She has one now, though, since we have distant family scattered across Eastern Europe. I don't know most of them, but she does, and she visits occasionally, when my grandmother starts declaring she's going to die soon and wants to see her sisters and nieces one last time." Rose's thumb brushed the photo on the first page.

Birth: 31 May 1964. Olena Olegovna Belikova. Novosibirsk.

Rose got the sense that the branch of the Belikov tree she knew weren't the ones who'd done a lot of moving around.

"There's a lot of women in your family," she observed, setting the passport aside and picking up a battered, dark green one.

"Weird luck." Dimitri laughed to himself, some inside joke she didn't know hiding in his words, and then nodded to the passport in Rose's hands, setting down the shirt in his hands to switch out CDs in the boombox. "That's my grandmother's first internal passport. She needed one to get to Omsk so she could go to St. Basil's."

Birth: 8 March 1937. Yeva Nikolaevna Belikova. Leningrad.

Yeva's birthday had slipped by a month prior without much fanfare, just as the woman had wanted, and Rose knew she was in her late seventies, but it was striking to see a photo of a sixteen-year-old Yeva staring back with that stereotypical, classic Soviet blank stare Rose always associated with the Cold War.

"It's strange," Rose murmured, tracing the edge of the photo on the page.

"What is?" Dimitri asked. Michael Jackson was musically picking a fight with vegetables from the floor by the closet.

"Yeva. I don't know, she just seems ageless. I can't imagine her being seven and begging for ice cream or something."

"It _is_ impossible," Dimitri said with a straight face, save the slight upturn of a corner of his mouth, "Considering there was no ice cream to be had during the war."

Rose smiled, shaking her head. His humor tended to be dry enough that most people never thought he was joking. She stopped before she said anything, though, staring at the passport. Yeva had been, what, two when World War II started? Her early childhood had been marked by that, ending when she was eight. Strange to consider that Yeva had grown up in the middle of a human war, while Rose had come of age during her own people's struggle against the Strigoi.

"What did she do about school, then?" Rose asked, feeling like all she'd done for the past hour was barrage Dimitri with endless questions. She wasn't about to stop, though. She'd caught Dimitri in an open mood, and she wasn't going to give it up unless she had to. Learning everything about him would never be enough to satisfy her hunger.

Not that he seemed to mind answering everything she threw at him. "She lived at St. Basil's year round. Her mother, like a lot of dhampir women did then, made sure my grandmother and her siblings got there safely and then was unable to reach them for almost ten years. The academies in Europe essentially went on lockdown, just in case the human war managed to spill over into our world. Her mother went back to being a guardian since she had no other access to income."

"I bet it wasn't fun being an Alchemist then," Rose mused, closing the passport. It was tiring just thinking about how much work must have gone into keeping a world war from affecting the Moroi more than it had to.

"Probably not," he agreed. He nodded to the last document in the small stack as she picked it up. "That was my first internal passport."

It was the only document among the handful he'd dug up that had Russian Federation printed on it. His birth patronym was listed. The issue date was in 1998.

"You look like Paul," she said, drinking in the sight of a teenage Dimitri. There were photos of him at all ages littering the house, but this was somehow more personal. "Or, Paul looks like you."

"He's always been mistaken for my son," Dimitri said. "It got annoying at one point, especially because Karo gets a kick out of it every time it happens."

Rose snorted. Karolina came off as firm and loving, much like the rest of her family, but when it came to Dimitri, she loved to get a rise out of her brother as much as any other older sister would.

"Here." He was handing her a plastic card, some of its shine gone from use and a slight bend in the middle, like it'd been sat on countless times. "This is my current one, for comparison."

This photo was much newer. Even through the printed pixels, Rose could see weariness creasing his mouth and bags under his eyes. His face was just as blank as any of the other photos she'd seen in the pile of documents sitting next to her knee, but she could read him better than most. Whenever this was taken, it was clear life was wearing him out. The date under his birthday was from 2013.

"Were you—"

"Yeah, we were together then." He wasn't looking at the card. "I might accidentally lose it in a few years and get a new one." It didn't sound like it'd be an accident at all. "I'm not sure yet. They don't expire, so I'd have to go through the headache of getting a replacement. It'd be worth it for a better picture, though."

"It would be," Rose agreed, already moving on in comparing the card and the stock paper.

"Sometimes I regret not taking the offer from your school."

Her head shot up, her eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"Most of the time," he amended, "I regret not taking the offer from Guardian Petrov to work on your runaway case." He looked thoughtful, part of him imagining what it would've been like. "I wouldn't have ended up in that disaster of a relationship. I could've met you sooner."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." He tossed a folded pair of socks on top of the mess of clothes. Rose eyed it warily. There was no way it was going to close as is. She could tell he wasn't really paying attention to what he was doing. "Every day of my life before you . . . I wouldn't call them a waste, but I was missing something."

"It was like walking around, wondering where your second arm was," Rose interpreted.

"Exactly. You don't think you need it to balance you—"

"—Until you find it and you realize you're so much better with it around."

His eyes met hers, understanding flowing between them. It was one of the endless things that Rose loved about him — he completely and totally got her in a way nobody else could ever dream of matching. She didn't have to explain herself because she knew he could infer what was going on with almost near perfect precision.

"I have no idea how I got through thirty years of my life without knowing you," he murmured, shaking his head.

She tried to tamp down her preening to little effect. "Imagine how boring your life would be if you'd never met me," she said, grinning.

"I don't ever want to," he said fiercely, the intensity in his gaze soaring straight to her core. "I love you too much to pretend I never found you."

She froze, spellbound. There'd be only one other time she heard him say that he loved her, when she was lying in a hospital bed and pushing herself to let go and be selfish in her wants for once, but it wasn't until now that she heard it in order. It was amazing how three little words — eight letters, one of them repeating — could send her to nirvana. How on earth did she get through each day until this trip without sharing her life with the man in front of her?

He seemed to realize what he said and she rocked up to her knees, her legs untangling, her hand grasping his shirt to pull him back to her before he could retreat. _I love you, too_ was stuck in her throat. The words felt final, like she was really giving him everything she had, and a small part of her was terrified at the thought of losing that last piece of independence.

"You love me?" she teased sweetly, diverting him from the fact that she didn't repeat it back to him.

"I do." His accent was thick enough that even just those two syllables sounded like a challenge for him.

"I don't believe you," she said, this time more flirtatious, more confident.

He arched an eyebrow, his tongue darting out to lick his lips. "You don't?"

"Not when you're still wearing clothes, I don't," she said, and then she yelped, a bright, surprised pitch filling her ears when he lunged for her and pushed the bag to the floor, forgotten about until the morning.


	5. Chapter Five

I know, I know — _two_ months! Real life continues to be a pain but if you've been following me and this story for a while, you'll be happy to hear my physical health is doing really well. I'm in the process of getting everything else sorted out. Next update should come much sooner than this.

Content warning for this chapter: emetophobia

* * *

Dimitri's car hadn't even finished backing out of the driveway before Karolina was pulling Rose away from the window and steering her towards the explosion of wedding planning that the living room had quickly become in recent days. One couch was buried under panels of fabric and color swatches; the other was littered with wedding magazines Rose couldn't remember seeing Karolina collecting. Sonya and Viktoria were sitting cross-legged on the floor flipping through magazines while Yeva was tucked away in her corner rocking chair, knitting something in forest green and probably, if Rose had to guess, playing up the soft, cuddly grandmother cliche just to fuck with her.

"You're no use to me wallowing," Karolina said brusquely, guiding Rose to sit in front of her sisters, "so there's no reason to do it."

"You look confused, Rose," Sonya said, eyes still fixed to the glossy pages she was flipping through.

"Yeah, uh… when did this happen?" Rose gestured to the room around her.

Viktoria, smirking, exchanged a glance with Sonya. "Do you _really_ want an answer to that?"

"Point taken," Rose said, eyes narrowed.

"Mama?" Karolina called out, panickedly rifling through the mountain of fabric. "Where is the dark blue chiffon?"

A pot clanged against a stove burner, but there was otherwise no response.

"'You come into the kitchen to speak to me.' Blah, blah, blah," Karolina huffed under her breath before disappearing into the other room.

Viktoria gave a dramatic sigh before falling over to lay her head on Rose's bent knee, her face all but pressed into her magazine. "I can't wait for this nightmare to be over. I promise you, Sonechka, that I won't be nearly as hellish with my own wedding."

"I know you won't be," Sonya said, still not looking up, "Because of the three of us, you're the most likely to run off with a man you met two hours prior."

" _Poshyol tiy_."

Grinning, Sonya batted away Viktoria's flung magazine with her own.

"You're probably not even going to get married, so I don't know why you're insulting me," Viktoria continued, not looking the least bit upset. "Are you?"

"If I find someone," Sonya shrugged, "Then maybe. But I have Katya. A man would just be a headache."

" _Gm_."

"And besides, if there's anyone who's next in line to marry, it's Dimka."

To Rose's surprise, Viktoria shook her head as she sat up. "He and Rose are guardians. It's completely different for him."

"Wait," Rose interjected, holding a hand up. "Who said it was me Dimitri would marry? If we could, I mean."

Sonya rolled her eyes. "Who else would it be?"

Rose didn't have an answer. The Belikovs' casual acceptance of her relationship with Dimitri was still jarring to Rose. She and Dimitri hadn't formally announced that they were together but they certainly weren't doing anything to hide it, and that alone would've been enough to turn heads and start rumors at Court.

"Could you imagine it, though?" Viktoria said, a dreamy smile on her face. Her soul-piercing eyes turned to Rose. "You two would have, like, a destination wedding on a beach somewhere."

"Sochi," Sonya cut in, suddenly looking invested in the conversation. She set her magazine down, her thumb marking her place. "Or maybe Vladivostok. It would have to be sunny and warm."

Viktoria nodded. "Definitely sunny. He's got this thing about sunlight."

"Who does?" Karolina asked, returning to the living room, Olena behind her.

"Dimitri."

"Oh. Yeah, Rose, he definitely does," Karolina said. "He hates the moon. Used to call it fake sunlight as a kid."

"Don't you girls have anything better to do than tease your brother?" Olena asked, tapping Viktoria on the shoulder and pointing to the magazine-covered couch.

"No," all three sisters chorused.

Olena sighed. "You could at least wait until he's here to defend himself," she said, sitting in the spot Viktoria had hurriedly cleared. "Attacking him behind his back is weak."

"I'd rather not have my favorite vase broken again," Sonya said, returning to her magazine.

Olena pressed her lips together at that and then turned to her eldest daughter. "So dark blue? You've finally decided?"

Karolina nodded, unearthing a panel of navy blue fabric. "Svetlana Borisovna won't mind me using all of this?"

"She said it was her wedding gift to you and Alex, and to spend the money you would have spent buying dresses for others on your own."

"Send my thanks." Karolina smiled. "Any of you have your dress picked out?"

Sonya flipped her magazine open and passed it across the small room to Karolina, one side folded back so only half the spread was visible. "You mind pinning that for me? I'm not entirely sure, but I'd like to see it."

Karolina's eyes flicked across the page. "Yeah, we can try this. Give Mama your measurements first."

"Are you sure you want me as a bridesmaid?" Rose asked Karolina, taking a couple of magazines from Viktoria. "I know you asked me, but you definitely—"

"I'm positive." Karolina's smile was warm. "I wouldn't have asked otherwise."

Rose watched in amazement as Olena flew through Sonya's measurements, jotting down numbers into a little book balanced on her knee. Sonya then turned to Karolina, who took a photo on her phone of Sonya at full-length and sketched out Sonya's idea of what she wanted her dress to look like: high neckline, but not too high; sheer above her chest; simple band at her waistline; no sleeves; and, as per Karolina's requirements, full-length and dark blue.

"Babushka, when are you cutting the fabric?" Karolina asked as Olena did Viktoria's measurements.

"Next weekend." Yeva didn't look away from her handiwork as she spoke. "First round of fittings will be in six weeks assuming your mother doesn't fall behind. Tell your friend Lyubov when you see her next week."

Karolina turned back to Viktoria, phone and sketchpad in hand. "What do you have in mind?"

"This," Viktoria said, passing to Karolina a torn out magazine photo.

"Absolutely not," Karolina replied with barely a glance at the dress.

"What? Why not?"

"Stop moving," Olena commanded, yanking Viktoria closer by the arm so she could get her inseam measurement.

"You're twenty-two years old and a mother," Karolina said. "It's time you start dressing like it."

Viktoria drew herself up and crossed her arms over her chest. "What are you implying?"

"I want my sister to look like she at least heard the word 'classy' once in her life," Karolina spat.

Silence blanketed the room. Rose wanted nothing more than to shove her face into her copy of _WEDDING_ much like Sonya was doing, but doing her interview with Viktoria later was going to be determined on how she handled her conversation with Karolina.

Viktoria's jaw tightened. "I don't want straps."

"Everyone has some kind of straps," Karolina said, making a face.

"I'll force you to let me do a plunging neckline."

"You're eleven years younger than me. You can't force me to do anything."

"No plunging neckline, then."

"So what _do_ you want?"

"I'll figure out some kind of straps if you let me have knee-length."

"No."

"Calf-length?"

"Still no."

"So you're not going to work with me at all on this?"

Rose watched as Karolina narrowed her eyes as she studied Viktoria. She glanced at the torn out page, up to her younger sister, and back down.

"No straps, sweetheart neckline, and _floor_ -length."

Viktoria started to pull a face. "At least make it fitted?"

"Bodice only," Karolina conceded. She handed the page back to Viktoria and started sketching, occasionally glancing up at Viktoria standing in front of her. When Viktoria still hadn't stopped frowning, Karolina paused and sighed, looking like she was doing her best not to roll her eyes. "Fix your face, you're getting free reign on hair and make-up."

That seemed to be enough for Viktoria, who grinned, her shoulders relaxing. "Excellent."

"You should trust her more," Sonya said out of nowhere, no longer hiding behind carefully photographed spreads. "The first dress she did start to finish was the one I wore to Ivan Zeklos's funeral, and you saw how well she designed that."

Rose felt self-conscious for the split second Viktoria's gaze flitted to her before landing on Sonya, confused. "I remember the dress but I don't remember why she made it for you. You went to that?"

"I couldn't go," Karolina explained, much quieter than she had been a minute prior. "You-Know-Who wanted me to come — as did Dimitri, even if he wouldn't say it — but it was at the Romanian Court and I had just started dating Sasha, so Sonya went in my place."

"Who? The Bitch?" Viktoria asked and then threw her hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

Rose suddenly felt like all eyes were on her. She felt like she was grasping at the edges of something when she very slowly asked, "Is that someone I'm supposed to know?"

Olena's mouth was set in the thinnest, tightest line Rose had ever seen on the woman's face.

"That's…not important right now," Sonya said. "What _is_ important is that you recognize Kalya won't screw you over with this."

"Fine," Viktoria relented. She turned to Karolina. "I trust you with this, sister. I think."

"Good enough for me," Karolina replied with a bright smile. "All right, Rose, your turn."

* * *

The rest of April slipped by uneventfully. The sun finally realized it radiated warmth, and by May, the snow had turned to slush, which turned to rain, and life hummed along.

That is, until one night in the middle of May, when Rose was jolted awake by a wave of nausea unlike any she'd ever felt. It was present and urgent, and she barely made it to her knees in front of the toilet across the hall before she was rehashing her dinner from several hours earlier.

"Rose?"

The bathroom light flickered on, and Rose turned to see Karolina hovering in the doorway, looking sleepy and wrapping her cardigan tighter around her as she crossed her arms over her stomach. The bulb above the sink was harsh against Rose's strained vision; before she could respond, she whipped back to the toilet bowl as more nausea hit her.

Karolina must have disappeared, because suddenly Alex was standing behind her, looking equally concerned. He slipped past his fiancée to lean down next to Rose, brushing her hair behind her shoulders. Two fingers caught her wrist to take her pulse.

"Go get your mother," he said quietly, and Karolina nodded sharply before leaving again.

Another wave, mostly sputum. Her stomach clenched tight in protest.

Within moments, Olena was trading places with Alex. She looked as bleary-eyed as her daughter. "How are you feeling?"

"Like shit," Rose muttered. She heaved and shuddered when Olena placed a cool hand on her back.

"What did you eat yesterday?"

"Everything you did."

"And nothing tasted odd to you?"

"I thought the borscht was off," Rose sighed heavily, trying to get her heartbeat under control, "But nobody else is reliving it, so…"

Olena's hand moved to her forehead. "Any chills or aches?"

Rose shook her head. The urge to vomit was beginning to subside a little bit. Exhausted, she sat back and leaned against the wall next to the toilet. The smell was beginning to get to her.

Karolina asked something Rose didn't quite catch, and Olena's answer was just as quick and quiet.

"Rose," Olena said, "I need to ask you a question you may not want to answer, but I need you to, no matter how you feel, okay?"

"What is it?" Rose asked, wincing at how loud her voice seemed in the tiled bathroom.

"Is there any chance at all that you could be pregnant?"

She stopped cold. There wasn't, she was sure, except…

"What day is it?" she asked weakly.

"Officially, the fifteenth," Alex supplied.

She grimaced as she did the math. "There might be. I'll know for sure in a couple of days."

Olena's face was mercifully blank, but Alex and Karolina had no qualms about letting suspicion play out on their faces. "Are you sure?" Olne asked carefully.

Rose nodded.

"So you cheated on Dimitri?" Karolina asked, vocalizing what her mother wouldn't.

It occurred to Rose then that for all the warmth and hospitality the Belikovs had shown her, their loyalty truly lay with their own. Rose was an outsider, only looking in from above for a short time before eventually leaving everything behind and flying back to her home country. If they wanted her gone, they would more than likely get their way.

For a moment, Karolina's accusation angered Rose. The thought of betraying Dimitri like that sent her tailspinning down a rabbit hole of Pissed Off and Semi-Passive-But-Mostly-Aggressive. Would she ever be done being given the third degree? Up until now, she hadn't really registered that their constant questioning and wanting to know what was going on with her and Dimitri was a flowing interrogation, bleeding days together. Logically, it made sense that they would be worried about someone who didn't belong getting so close to arguably the one family member whose heart they all agreed needed to be protected the most. The rationale still didn't make Rose feel any better, though. She tucked her hair back, not wanting it in her face, fingers lingering behind her ear for a moment, and then she remembered.

Carrying secrets she talked about regularly with a select number of people meant often times, she forgot that information wasn't common knowledge. There were maybe half a dozen people who knew of Declan's conception, and Rose was the only one of them currently not at Court. There was no way Karolina or anyone else could know that yes, it was totally possible that Dimitri could've gotten her pregnant.

Hearing the words strung together in her mind had her back over the toilet, heaving hard and crying from the exertion. Her stomach had emptied long ago. Any much more of this, and blood would start coming up. Olena, still on her knees next to Rose, held the her hair back gently and murmured something to Alex that was lost to Rose over her pained retching.

She was visibly shaking hard when she sat back, reaching for toilet paper to at least wipe some of the taste out of her mouth. Alex returned, glass of water in hand, and Olena took it with a quiet thanks. She flushed the toilet, her arm wrapping around Rose when she leaned into the older woman, and held the water out to Rose.

"Rinse your mouth out," Olena instructed.

Rose did, several times, and then took a small sip at Olena's behest. It was nice not have to do this on her own. A few minutes later, when she managed a few more sips and then rinsed her mouth out one last time, spitting it into the toilet, she drew away from Olena and leaned back against the wall again, tremors still running through her hands. Karolina was stormy, arms crossed and eyes dark and cut off, still waiting for an answer, Alex leaning against the counter next to her in a similar stance. Olena was doing her best to look neutral despite the wariness Rose felt emanating from her.

Rose took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down. She was cold and all she wanted to do was crawl back into bed, not fumble her way through this conversation. "I can't—I can't say how or why." She ran a hand down her sweaty face and wiped it off on the leggings she'd been sleeping in. "It's a state secret thing." _For now._ "But you have to trust me when I say yes, it's possible, no, he's the only one. He will only ever _be_ the only one."

Karolina was the only one of the three who didn't accept the answer. Alex, seeing it plain across Karolina's face, pulled her out into the hallway, closing the door behind them.

"Rose," Olena said quietly. She wasn't fully convinced, Rose could see, but it was a lot more than what her daughter had given Rose. "Are you absolutely positive? I won't say anything to anyone else if you aren't, but I need to know for your sake."

Another deep breath. It killed Rose that she couldn't say anything, but telling anyone about the Strigoi vaccine who wasn't already in the know would be grounds for arrest, and she'd already seen what the Court prison looked like. She really didn't want to go back ever again.

"It's two in the morning," Rose said, curled against the wall and not breaking eye contact. "The sun will come up and the sky will be blue. I'll still be a guardian and you'll still be a mother and Dimitri will be the only person I've had sex with in years." She hated that he wasn't here right now, soothing her pain just by holding her close and letting his scent envelope her. "I speak in absolute truths. Believe me or don't, but I could never hurt him like that, not when he means the world to me the way he does."

At the end of the day, Rose would be in the good graces of Dimitri's sisters or not, and while it would make things difficult it she wasn't, it wouldn't be a dealbreaker. His mother, however, was the only person who could tell Dimitri no and have him listen. She'd seen the way he interacted with her, how he loved and adored his mother like a storybook character; her opinion was one he always took into serious consideration. Despite what Rose said, she wanted desperately for Olena to believe her. Usually Rose didn't give two thoughts one way or the other what people thought of her, but important people like Dimitri's mother? They were an exception.

Olena was silent, studying her, face blank. Rose was reminded of the photo she'd seen in Olena's old internal passport, of a young lady hardened by the economic troubles of the late 70s in the Soviet Union. Impassive and unyielding, it was obvious Olena didn't back down, not when she had a decision to make. If Rose had just met the woman, she would've felt like she was being scrutinized from the inside out. Olena might've been raised a Soviet, but she was also Yeva Belikova's daughter, and the latter was just as intense to Rose as the former.

Eventually, her gaze softened, and she nodded, flushing the toilet again and standing. She reached a hand down to Rose, who took the help in getting up off the floor. When she spoke, her voice was quiet, nothing but stoic, tough love.

"We won't know anything for a few days. You can take a pregnancy test then since it won't work until your cycle starts. If you aren't pregnant—" Her tone wavered, like she'd already made her mind up on the matter. "—And this isn't from eating something bad but you're still not well, I'll have Sasha take you to the Moroi clinic in Barabinsk. No need to go to the hospital in the city. In the meantime…" She paused. "Try to get some more sleep. We'll see how you are in the morning."

Rose nodded, arms wrapped around her stomach.

In the hallway, Karolina and Alex were in a heated discussion, whispers in Russian flying too fast for Rose to try to follow. They stopped when Olena opened the door, heads turning to the movement in time.

"See Rose gets back to bed," Olena told Karolina, tired annoyance edging her voice. Rose winced, feeling just enough unwell to take the woman's tone personally, even though she knew there was a good chance it probably wasn't aimed at her. "I'm going back to sleep."

Karolina followed Rose silently, ignoring her fiance's and mother's bids goodnight, and stood by the door, unsure as she watched Rose gingerly slide back under the blankets and pull them tight around her chest.

The movement disoriented Rose and for a few moments, the world rocked as her stomach tried to calm down. "Wait," she called when she heard Karolina turn to leave, pushing through the nausea.

Karolina didn't say anything, but she didn't leave, either.

Twisting towards the older woman, Rose steeled herself. It was too much to try to keep this to herself. If anyone found out what she was about to do, being relegated to desk work would be a blessing of a punishment, but she didn't care. She wanted to tell Karolina and Rose felt it in her gut that of all the Belikov women, Karolina was perhaps the only one who wouldn't run to the rest of the family to talk about it.

"Have you heard about Sonya Karp?" Rose asked, figuring that was the best place to start.

Karolina tilted her head and shook it, leaning against the closet wall with her arms crossed. Half a beat later, recognition dawned in her eyes. "She's a Moroi, right? A spirit user?"

"Yeah."

"There was something with her being a Strigoi and then not." Karolina sounded like she was digging deep in her memories for whatever she knew about the woman.

"She was restored," Rose clarified.

That pulled Karolina in. She took a few cautious steps and then sat on the corner of the bed by Rose's feet. "We didn't get the full story out here. We heard about it when she turned, mostly because she worked at the academy in the States Dimitri almost took a job at."

Rose nodded. "St. Vladimir's. I went there. I knew her."

Karolina looked mildly impressed. "A couple years ago, there was a rumor she was Moroi again, but nobody really believed it." Something struck her. "Well, except for Mark and Oksana, but they were really quiet about why."

 _Interesting._ She'd have to find them once she felt better. For a couple who lived on the edge of a town in the middle of nowhere, they were far busier than Rose was.

"She is," Rose said, straightening her body out. She could look down the length of her body without upsetting her stomach. "I watched my friend restore her."

"How?"

"Spirit magic." Her hands were cold and she shoved them under her arms to try to warm them back up a little. "If a spirit user charms a silver stake with spirit and then stakes a Strigoi in the heart, it heals them back to almost their original state."

"I believe it," Karolina said, her shoulders relaxing slightly.

"You do?" Rose wasn't expecting Karolina to take the information in stride.

"Mhm. I've seen and felt Oksana do things that shouldn't be possible because of spirit. She charmed a necklace for me when my anxiety was bad during my pregnancy with Paul. Nothing else calmed me down except for that."

Something else to discuss the next time Rose saw them.

(On the peripherals of her thoughts, a tiny voice wondered if being so distracted by her relationship with Dimitri over the past few months was making her not take advantage of opportunities for personal growth.)

(On the other hand, was it _her_ growth or was learning more about spirit for Lissa's sake?)

(She was too worn out to think about it.)

"You said someone who's been restored was _almost_ their normal self," Karolina said when Rose, following her side train of thought, didn't speak. Karolina's voice had softened throughout the course of their conversation, curiosity winning out over whatever she felt at the beginning. "What's different about them?"

"We only know of two things right now," Rose said, her nerves starting to ramp up as she got closer to spilling one of her biggest secrets. _Breathe. It's just Karolina._ "It seems everyone who's restored has some kind of immunity against being turned again."

Karolina's head twitched, half turning from Rose. "Really?"

"Yeah," Rose said. "Sonya's not the only person who's been restored. We've run into a couple others after her. We don't know why, just that the blood of those restored is impossible for Strigoi to drink. They can't stand it. It's like if we tried to eat dirt."

"Alright." Karolina nodded slowly, taking the information in. "What's the other thing?"

Rose took a deep breath, holding it in for a few seconds before exhaling slowly. She saw Karolina's interest pique further at her deliberate pause. _This is it. All or nothing._

"Restored dhampirs can have biological children with other dhampirs."

And then her heart sank when she saw Karolina's face close off. _This_ was the reaction Rose was definitely expecting, though Karolina's acceptance up until now had bolstered her hope a little.

"That's impossible."

Rose pushed herself up. Anxiety hummed through her, and she was suddenly worried she'd made a mistake in her judgment of Karolina's personality. She couldn't handle lying down for this.

"So should being able to restore Strigoi," Rose pointed out.

Karolina's jaw tightened. "How do you know?"

"Declan, Sydney's son." She purposely left out Adrian's name. "His biological parents are both dhampir. His mother was restored by her sister and his father's a guardian. Or was. I'm not sure what his status is right now. He asked Sydney to take the baby and then disappeared."

"What about his mother?" Karolina demanded.

Flashes of Olive, huddled against a tree and holding Declan with the arm still attached to her body, bloody and torn apart, sped through Rose's mind and she shut her eyes as though it might get rid of the memories. "She died." Rose opened her eyes, focusing on Karolina, alive and together and in front of her. "It's a long story, but where she was hiding out, it was attacked when some of us were there looking for her. She was terrified Declan would be taken away and tested on, like a lab rat, so she tried to run off with him. One of the Strigoi got to her before we could."

Karolina looked torn apart by the story, even if she wasn't fully convinced.

"Both of his biological parents claimed they'd only been with each other," Rose continued. "Neil will still defend that if you asked him, even if he wants nothing to do with Declan right now."

"That's still not—"

"Do you know what auras are?"

Eyes narrowed, Karolina bit the inside of her cheek as she thought. "It's a spirit thing, I think. Right?"

"Some spirit users can read auras," Rose agreed, hands still clasped tightly in her lap. "They've been described to me as, like, bands of colors around a person that tell spirit users how you feel. Spirit users themselves have gold because of their magic. Declan has some gold in his."

"That's…" She took a quick breath, her body up and down with the motion. "That goes against everything I know," she said quietly. "I… that may take some time to come to terms with."

Rose hesitated. "So you believe me?"

"Yes," Karolina said slowly and Rose deflated a little, some of her worry slipping away. "In that I can tell you're not just telling me stories. But… I'm not sure I follow the connection between this information and you."

She could've smacked herself on the forehead in annoyance. It was the middle of the night and Karolina had been pulled from sleep. And anyway, she couldn't read Rose's mind. Rose had forgotten the jump wasn't obvious to someone just learning about this.

"A couple of years ago, a handful of us back at Court tried to see if we could replicate the Strigoi immunity that the restored have. Turn it into some kind of vaccine or something. We…we got it to work. We think. Lissa doesn't want to throw anyone who's been vaccinated in front of a Strigoi to see if it works, but by all appearances… yeah, we're pretty confident. And if it _does_ work, that means vaccinated dhampirs would biologically be the same as restored dhampirs. I…I have it." Rose swallowed, regarding Karolina with the nerves of a thousand butterflies. "The vaccine."

Karolina's gaze whipped to Rose, comprehension in her eyes. "I understand now." Scrutiny crept in. "Have you told Dimitri?"

The very thing Rose was dreading. She shook her head, fingers twisting in her lap to warm them up. "I probably shouldn't even have let on that it was a possibility, let alone tell you about it or Declan's true parentage. This is something that Lissa has no intention of sharing any time soon, at least not until Declan's older and can fend for himself."

"So, no."

"…No, not this."

A hand fell on Rose's leg. She could barely feel Karolina's heat through the layers of fabric. "I don't advocate for lying or withholding the truth," she said, trying to make sense of everything herself. "But it's not an easy situation."

"I know." Rose's head fell back, resting on top of the headboard, her hair brushing the window. Behind her, the world slept on, completely unaware. "I really…"

"Really what?"

 _I really hope I'm not._

Rose clammed up and she shook her head, staring at the ceiling. She wasn't sure if Karolina would take it well if she admitted to not wanting kids. "I'm tired," she said, suddenly with the overwhelming desire to be alone.

If Karolina was put out by the abrupt ending, she didn't show it. She stood slowly, just as weary as Rose felt. "I'll turn the light out when I leave."

"Thanks." Footsteps, then darkness. The door opened. "Karolina?"

" _Da_ , Rose?"

She tilted her head forward, her vision quickly adjusting to the lack of light. Karolina stood in the doorway, hand on the knob, her sole source of support in this. She suddenly felt like a little girl, dropped in a trench of uncertainty with nothing but a stick and a vague sense of where was up.

If there was one way to fuck everything up, it would be to end up pregnant.

 _Birth control._

 _We've been over this before. The only thing you could do that wouldn't raise questions would be—_

"Where would the closest gynecologist be?"

Karolina looked horribly confused for a moment. She shifted weight, leaning on her right leg, her hip jutting against the wall. "Novosibirsk, probably. Omsk after that, in the unlikely event Novosibirsk didn't have anyone, but Novosibirsk would be my first choice. Why?"

 _Why? Didn't this woman have two kids?_

Novosibirsk was half a day's drive at least. There was no way Rose could get there on her own.

"I wanted to know, just in case the test…" Rose took a deep breath. A headache was forming at her temples, egging her nausea on. She was literally going to make herself sick over this.

"Mama has medical training," Karolina said, still confused. "Midwifery included. She looked after all of us." 'Us' was probably her and her sisters, Rose figured. "Besides," she added offhandedly, "You don't need to go all the way to the city to get an abortion. We've got a clinic here in Baia."

The casualness with which Karolina spoke floored Rose. She blinked rapidly, unsure she heard her correctly. "I'm sorry, _what_?"

"That's what you want, isn't it?"

 _Um._

"I can see it. Vika had the same look as you when she got pregnant last fall."

Her stomach dropped.

 _What the fuck?_

Rose leaned over the side of the bed and barely grabbed the wastebasket tucked between the bedside table and wall before vomiting again. It was mostly clear, what little water she drank coming back up and burning her throat and nose on its way out.

What weird as hell turn did this conversation take and when did Rose not see it coming?

Karolina had the light back on and was next to Rose in an instant, pulling her hair back. When Rose surfaced, Karolina took the wastebasket and set it on her other side. "Do you need to rinse your mouth out again?"

The taste wasn't unbearable. "No, I'm good."

"Probably a stupid question, but are you alright?"

 _Abortion_. Maybe it was an American thing, not considering it. Or, at the very least, treating it way more respectfully than flinging out the suggestion like she should start wearing blue instead of red on Wednesdays.

Rose swallowed, wincing at the taste, and flumped back against the headboard, shaking a little again. "I feel like crap."

"Yeah, I see that," Karolina said with a small laugh, relieving some of her tension.

"That's…." Rose groped for the right words, trying to toe the line between sharing her opinion without offending Karolina. "I wasn't even thinking about getting an abortion."

"Really?"

"Never crossed my mind," Rose admitted.

" _Really_?"

Now it was Rose's turn to be confused. "Yeah, why?"

"It's so…common…here, I guess is the right word." Karolina's eyebrows furrowed together. "Is it not in the States?"

Rose shook her head. "It happens, but it's a difficult process. They make you wait and go through therapy and stuff. Most people choose not to do it because there's so much red tape. And then among people I know of, usually you're pregnant when you want to be, so…"

"That sounds so dumb," Karolina said bluntly.

"Really?"

"You shouldn't have to keep a child you don't want." She made it sound so simple. It didn't add up with a lot of the _women stay home and raise children, men go off to fight_ rhetoric Rose heard perpetuated throughout Baia. "Nobody gets to decide what you do with your body. Except maybe the father, if he's around. He should be able to voice his opinion, but ultimately it's your choice."

"There are Americans who might actually burn you at the stake for saying that," Rose joked. Going to Lehigh with Lissa had exposed her to a lot of human politics and affairs that she hadn't really paid attention to when they were on the run as teenagers. Fifteen-year-old Rose had been more worried about Lissa's next feeding and whether they were being followed on the way home from school, not some war in the Middle East that had no bearing on her people. Twenty-year-old Rose had still been worried about the being-followed thing, but there was a lot more security in their setting, so she'd been able to actually pay attention to her surroundings. Plus, with Lissa as Queen, Rose found herself caring more about politics anyway.

Karolina's smile was rueful. "I'm sure those Americans would already burn me for simply being born where I was." At Rose's look, she laughed. "We may have lost the Cold War, Rose, but it never really ended."

She didn't have a response for that, and Karolina took it as her cue to leave for good this time. "I wouldn't worry too much about it right now. We don't even know for sure if you're pregnant or not, so this could all be pointless, and if you are, there's nothing you can do about it at three in the morning." She smoothed a hand down Rose's hair, her maternal side out in full force. "Try to get some sleep, as unhelpful as that may sound."

 _Really unhelpful, actually._ Rose nodded, not moving.

"I'll take care of this," Karolina said, picking up the wastebasket as she stood. "You focus on resting. No matter what's going on, you'll stress yourself out if you stay up all night worrying."

Never mind that that was exactly what Rose felt like doing. As much as her body wanted to pull her into sleep, the need to start planning for everything that could possibly happen felt out of her control.

"I'll try," Rose said and Karolina nodded.

"I'll be back in a minute."

Rose slid down, eyes fixed on the dark blue wallpaper staring back at her, unassuming and completely innocent. Darkness fell when Karolina switched the light off, and she left the door open. The sounds of a plastic bag rustling filtered from the bathroom across the hall, then running water. More plastic. She padded back in, set the wastebasket down in front of the bedside table so Rose wouldn't have to reach.

" _Glaza boyatsya, a ruki delayut_ ," Karolina whispered, squeezing Rose's arm gently. "You'll get through this."

 _The eyes are afraid, but the hands do the job._

The words bounced around Rose's head and instead of letting them overwhelm her, she focused on writing them in imaginary letters on the wall, if only so she didn't lose it.

She had them printed out a third time when her phone buzzed loud against the bedside table. Her hand shot out to grab it, hoping no one heard it, and she didn't know whether to smile in relief, laugh at the irony, or straight up cry when she saw the text, a second one arriving with a softer vibration as she unlocked the screen.

 **Dimitri:** Today feels like it will never end and it's not even three yet.

 **Dimitri:** Call me when you wake up. I miss your voice.

A strangled half-sob sounded out of Rose's chest and she closed the screen, tucking her phone against her chest, fighting off tears.

She wouldn't tell him, not until she had more confirmation that a weird, unexplainable night of vomiting ( _morning sickness_ , her brain helpfully supplied) was just that. But he'd ask how she was and how she slept, and she would want to tell him that she wasn't great, and he'd press for more, and she'd feel even worse for not telling him the whole truth.

What a shitty night.


	6. Chapter Six

I'M ALIVE.

Now that my degree is finished (hooray!) and the holidays are over (double hooray!) I'm back and we're going to be on a pretty normal update schedule (a chapter every week or so) so we can get this ball rolling again!

If you need to, I'd recommend going back and at least skimming the last chapter to refresh your memory.

* * *

Rose moved through the weekend in a haze, desperately hoping for her usual back pain or muscle soreness to make their monthly appearance, only to return to bed each night feeling more hopeless than the last. The nausea was always there to some extent, abating in the afternoon and striking hard and heavy the early morning hours. Bread and tea became the only thing she could keep down, and she didn't bother asking for the contents of each mug Yeva handed her with a quietly muttered _drink this quickly_.

She caught herself staring at her stomach Monday morning as she was getting dressed, her hands lingering on the skin just above the space between her hipbones. It seemed too crazy an idea to be real. She couldn't be pregnant. She couldn't be. She just couldn't.

Her fingers twitched, pressing down slightly. She was beginning to regret being one of the vaccine's test dummies. She wouldn't be in this mess if she hadn't succumbed to the excited, hopeful look on Lissa's face when Neil Raymond's injection had been a success.

Lissa. Where was her best friend lately? Even with the bond numbed out from Lissa's newest antidepressants, Rose could still catch a careful optimism lurking underneath minor agitation and nervousness when she reached across, which wasn't often anymore. The new medication made it more difficult than it was worth. Mostly, Rose only caught waves of intense emotion and flashes of what Lissa was seeing; the bond wasn't like it had been in the past, when she got sucked in without warning on a near daily basis.

Rose was grateful to keep her mental block up and let the bond remain untouched. Over the past few weeks, dealing with the whirlwind of her spontaneous trip to St. Basil's, healing from the attack, and navigating all the fluctuations in her relationship with Dimitri—including trying to look past how empty and dull Baia felt without him after he went back to duty—left Rose exhausted by her own life. Dealing with Lissa's life on top of all of it was too much.

Equally relieving was Karolina's response. She never said a word about what Rose had revealed, instead stepping up to the plate and looking after Rose and her symptoms like she was Rose's worried older sister. Word had gotten around quickly that Rose wasn't feeling well, and while she couldn't go twenty minutes without someone asking her how she felt and if she needed anything, Karolina had more or less taken over and the rest of the family seemed content to let her do so.

The kids especially had picked up on Rose's change in behavior; Alexei in particular took to Rose, somewhat to Viktoria's surprise, and she pushed through her days lying with the four-year-old on the bed, playing cartoons for him on Netflix and whatever other streaming sites she could finagle around Russia's Internet filters. Rose knew she wouldn't have gotten out of bed at all if it hadn't been for Karolina, and she worried how she'd ever return the favor, even after Karolina waved off her concerns.

In the mirror, Rose stood, transfixed, as her fingers stretched across smooth skin. She tried to imagine it, a little thing inside, just under her fingertips. How big was a fetus at a month? Pea-sized? Smaller? Sydney would know, Rose mused with a small, brief smile. She'd give Rose a dozen books on pregnancy and parenting and then refute every point they made that she didn't agree with.

The mental image almost started to take on a mind of its own. Adrian assuming baby-talking duties and letting Sydney roll her eyes when he tried to claim that classic rock was good for fetal development. Lissa and Mia taking over the planning, setting up a registry for the rest of their friends and designing a nursery _because we know you won't think about this stuff until you're home with the baby_. Eddie would offer to go on midnight craving runs, while Jill would draft up lists and lists of potential baby names with neatly printed stars next everyone's personal favorites.

And Dimitri, present for everything in this particular fantasy, would be over the moon. His face was clearest in her mind's eye: hope and wonder laid out bare for Rose and the world to see.

It was almost frightening how easy the images came to her once she let her guard down. A little girl, three or four, sitting on Dimitri's shoulders. Her dark eyes and hair blended their features together perfectly. Birthdays and friends and skinned knees… a whole life played out before Rose in a matter of moments. Grown up, bringing home someone special who looked at their daughter the way Dimitri looked at her. Holidays and school breaks in Russia, Skype calls scattered throughout the year so she could know her extended family. Would she speak Russian? Probably, if Dimitri was around like she pictured.

Growing old herself, though… Rose couldn't see it. Maybe it was a guardian thing to not plan for or commit to anything long term. She tried to imagine herself at thirty, at Dimitri's age. Would her life be good in seven years? Would she have taken advantage of her twenties? The thought of wasting her life was terrifying, and if she was honest with herself, having a kid at her age felt a little too close to that for comfort. She knew plenty of women had kids before they'd reached her age and were quite happy with the decision — she was living in a house full of them — but personally, the idea of putting her life on hold for the next two decades was enough to make her feel like she'd already missed out on the best part of her life.

Curling her fingers against her stomach, Rose forced herself to take a deep breath. None of that had happened yet. She needed to get it together and remember that.

She tore her eyes away from her midsection and cringed as her gaze drifted over the rest of her. Her hair was as limp as thick hair could be and the bags under her eyes were dark, contrasting harshly against her washed-out complexion. It'd been three days. What she would give for a full, uninterrupted night's sleep.

Her phone was dialing a number and pressed to her ear before she was aware of what she was doing. The line picked up on the third ring.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Jill?"

"…Rose?" On the other end, she heard someone — Eddie — grumble loud enough to make it across the line. "Is everything okay? You don't usually call me."

"Yeah, um… Where are you?" Rose caught sight of herself in the mirror again. She turned to analyze the silhouette of her torso, wondering if she was imagining a slight bump that used to not be there before.

"In bed." Jill had a way of not making Rose feel chastised for asking an obvious question. Jill may not have been a spirit user, but she still inherited the natural Dragomir charm.

"Can you go somewhere… not near anyone?" Rose asked awkwardly, her tongue heavy.

"Yeah, of course." There was some shuffling, followed by the click of a door pushed shut. "What's up?"

"How—how are you?" Rose asked, suddenly half-stalling.

"I'm good. Tired, but that's to be expected, I'm told."

"And the baby?"

"The little guy's doing just fine."

"Little guy?"

Rose could practically hear Jill's eye roll. "Adrian's been by a lot recently, and he's convinced it's a boy based on my aura or some crap. He's going stir-crazy waiting for his new medication to start working, and he's making _me_ lose it in the process. It's bad enough that I'm already in his head full-time."

Hearing Jill chatter away like normal brought Rose a small amount of comfort. It was a sign that not everything was unraveling. She sucked in her stomach absent-mindedly, still sideways to the mirror.

"How did… how did you know you were pregnant?" Rose asked after Jill trailed off. The strength in her voice caught her off guard. She'd been expecting to sound weak and fearful.

"My boobs," Jill said, followed by a soft laugh. "I noticed them more than usual. I thought it was just me overthinking things until I missed my period. Twice, since college is enough to make the most observant of us miss the obvious." She fell silent. "Why are you… you are, aren't you?" Her voice was quiet and warm. Rose could already hear Jill's maternal instinct bleeding through. "Is that why you called me?"

"Maybe." She had to look away from the mirror. Pulling herself away, she sat on Dimitri's side of the bed, curling her legs up into her with her feet braced on the edge. Zoya's pedicure from a few days prior was starting to chip already.

Jill's tone turned wary. "Rose, you haven't been…"

"Haven't been what?"

"You know…" It was clear Jill was trying to be delicate about her question with the kind of political grace she hadn't quite mastered. "Well, you know, you tend to be a very 'When In Rome' kind of person when you want…"

Disgust rolled over Rose. "Oh God, no, of course not."

"I'm sorry, it's just—"

"No, you're fine, Jill. I'm sorry." Rose dug her forehead into a knee. Another headache was forming. "It's… you probably heard from Eddie after he got back."

"You mean your fling with Dimitri Belikov? Oh, yeah, Eddie told me all about it. He was kind of shocked and needed to download with someone." Jill paused. "I thought you guys were a no-go, though, because of Lissa's assignment."

"Yeah, and then a Strigoi almost choked me out and Dimitri realized he couldn't live without me," Rose snarked. "It's all very _Romeo and Juliet_ , the remix."

Jill snorted. "So does that mean the vaccine works, then? For the dhampir infertility thing?"

"If I'm pregnant—" The words were alien on Rose's tongue. "And that's a big 'if', then yeah, I guess it does. I mean, look at Declan."

"I'm not a doctor," Jill said after a few moments, "So I'm not going to tell you one way or the other. They have pregnancy tests over there, right?"

"It's Siberia, not Mars, though I'm sure I've insinuated they're one and the same in the past."

That got an actual laugh out of Jill. "How long have you been feeling like this?"

"A couple of days?" Rose estimated. "Although my concentration's been off for a while now."

Jill's silence stretched one for almost half a minute.

"You there?" Rose asked, just as her anxiety was kicking in.

"Sorry, I'm here." Jill hummed. "I'd do a pregnancy test before you go running off to a doctor, but that's probably not news to you."

"It's not."

"That's as much as I can offer right now, I'm afraid. But I'm here, day or night, whatever those words mean to us." She laughed again, but there was something distracted about it. "I know it's not Mars, but I can imagine Siberia can feel pretty lonely some days with no one to talk to about this."

Guilt tanged Rose's mouth. "Yeah, it can be," she said, ignoring her conversation with Karolina the other night. Dimitri's sister hadn't stopped playing with her engagement ring since.

On the other end, five thousand miles away, Jill yawned.

"Thank you," Rose said, hoping she sounded sincere, because she was. "Really."

"Any time. Let me know what happens, okay?"

"I will. Definitely."

"Cool." Jill yawned again. "I'm going back to bed."

Rose laughed. "Night, Jailbait."

* * *

It took a couple of tries for Rose to get her shaking under control long enough to recap the test stick. She set it down on the bathroom counter and opened the door.

"Five minutes?" Karolina asked. Her seriousness always reminded Rose of Dimitri, but the worry hiding in her eyes made Rose's heart constrict.

 _He should be here. This is his kid. Maybe._

Never before had she wanted a hug from him as much as she did in that moment. Her ears rang with silence where whispered words of reassurance should have been.

She slid down the wall opposite where Karolina was sitting on the floor, hands still shaking. She wiped her sweaty palms along the seams of her jeans to no avail.

"No matter what happens," Karolina said, legs crossed underneath her, "You've got us. You're not alone in this."

 _Then why do I feel so far away from everyone?_

Waiting did nothing to calm Rose's nerves, so she walked herself through breathing exercises that always seemed to work for Lissa — counting beats and focusing on things like her head against the papered wall and the hardness of the wood floor beneath her. For a few moments, she didn't feel so wild with anxiety.

All too soon, the countdown on her phone went off. She opened her eyes, half-wishing she didn't have to. _This is it._

"I can look for you, if you want," Karolina offered, and Rose shook her head.

"I need to do this," she got out, sounding a bit like a strangled cat.

Karolina gave a nod of support and then Rose pushed herself up to stand, steeling herself with a final deep breath.

Inside the bathroom, she stood in front of the test, staring at herself in the mirror for what felt like the millionth time in the past week. She was vaguely aware of Karolina moving towards the doorway, hovering gently. Her hands were surprisingly steady as she picked up the test.

One line.

Relief hit Rose so hard that she fell to her knees, a noise of happiness strangling its way out of her throat. She pressed her forehead into the edge of the counter. The world wasn't going to end. She wasn't pregnant. Everything would be okay.

So if she wasn't pregnant, then what the hell was going on with her?

* * *

MAY 19 (TUES)

Belikova K.R.

 _English Version_

Please state the names of your parents. (Q1.1)

[REDACTED] _and_ [REDACTED] _. My mother is a dhampir and my father is a Moroi._

Who raised you? (Q1.2)

 _My mother, primarily. My father would visit once or twice a year until I was fifteen._

[ … ]

Did you at any point consider becoming a guardian? (Q2.5)

 _No, never._

Why not? (Q2.7b)

 _My father had two guardians and he treated them like dirt. I didn't want to end up in that position — underpaid and overworked and unappreciated. Then, I had [my son] when I was seventeen. That killed any thoughts I may have had about becoming a guardian. My focus became him._

Do you wish you'd done anything differently? (Q2.8)

 _In what regard?_

Career choice, family choice…

 _I certainly do not regret my choices in family matters. I feel more useful raising my children than I would if I were off fighting Strigoi. As for my job… [my sister] once joked that there aren't many differences between working as a waitress and working as a guardian. I told her the most important difference to me was that the people I serve in the restaurant don't want to eat me._

[ … ]

Outline your education history. (Q4.1)

 _I attended St. Basil's Academy from grades zero to ten [from] 1987 to 1999. I dropped out when I became pregnant._

If there was an easy, streamlined process to return to school in order to finish your education, would you? (Q4.2a)

 _I don't know. It would open some more doors, as you Americans say, but I am happy and comfortable with what I do now._

[ … ]

How much physical combat do you know? (Q5.1)

 _A decent amount._

Elaborate. (QI.3)

 _I can defend myself and my family if need be, but I don't know how to handle a stake or gun, and I don't believe I could kill a Strigoi if I were in that type of situation._

Do you believe the amount of physical combat you do know is adequate enough to feel safe in your daily life? (Q5.2)

 _Yes._

Why? (QI.1e)

 _I can run, and that's really all you need to survive._

If offered the opportunity to increase the amount of physical combat you know, would you accept or participate? (Q5.3)

 _I don't believe so._

Why not? (QI.2b)

 _I know enough. I don't need to unnecessarily put myself in harm's way or risk injury when I have a young daughter to think about._

[ … ]

Would you consider yourself to be anti-Moroi, have anti-Moroi thoughts, or disseminate any kind of anti-Moroi sentiment? (Q6.3)

 _I certainly think Moroi can and should defend themselves. If that constitutes anti-Moroi sentiment, then yes. Otherwise, no._

Where do you believe these opinions come from? (Q6.4)

 _My father was a horrible man and my first exposure to the Moroi as a whole. I may or may not have grown up with a biased view of the world._

[ … ]

* * *

One of Rose's more exciting finds in Baia was a tiny café called Lyudmila's Bakery, ran by an old dhampir woman of the same name and nestled in between a bookstore and the pharmacy Sonya worked at. It was a hike to get there on foot — almost a full hour's walk to the other side of Baia — but worth it for a once-a-week trip to get hot chocolate she recognized and fresh baked croissants easily the size of her face. Thursday runs were her longest of the week, and once she'd figured out a mental map of the town, she adjusted them to end at Lydumila's. Ever since the weather warmed up and Rose picked up her daily runs again, it was like clockwork.

" _Roza_ ," Lyudmila greeted when Rose slipped in, a bright smile on her face. It was six in the morning and Rose knew the woman had been up for hours baking and prepping with her two daughters by then; if Lyudmila was tired, Rose couldn't see it.

" _Dobroe utro, Lyudmila Alexandrovna_." Rose pulled her earbuds out and wrapped them around her phone. _Good morning, Lyudmila._

" _Shokolad i kruassan_?"

Rose shook her head, pulling a five hundred rouble note from her sports bra. " _Ne shokolad. Chai, seychas_. _Slishkom teplo dlya shokolada_." _Chai today. It's too warm for hot chocolate._

Lyudmila took the bill and made change before turning to put Rose's order together. " _Viy ne byli zdes' na proshloy nedele_." _You were_ _n't here last week._

" _Ya biyl bolen, no seychas ya v poryadke_ ," Rose replied with a tight smile. _I was sick, but I'm fine now._

Rest and Yeva's mystery tea seemed to be doing the trick as of late, but she still couldn't quite shake the occasional bouts of nausea or fatigue. Olena couldn't pinpoint what the problem was and Rose was beginning to worry she was simply imagining it somehow.

" _Eto khorosho_ ," Lyudmila said, sliding a mug and small plate across the counter. " _Olena obladayet vy slishkom zanyat dlya vas, chtoby byt' bol'nym._ " _That's good. Olena has you too busy for you to be ill._

Rose laughed. " _Ona opredelenno delayet_." _She definitely does._

There was an overstuffed armchair in the corner of the shop by the front window that Rose took up residence in every week for an hour (sometimes longer), capitalizing on the quiet time to people watch and write. She was two sips and forty words into translating her overdue interview with Olena when company dragged a chair over and made themselves comfortable.

Her eyes slowly flicked from her phone to the person across from her. Her half-eaten croissant landed in the pit of her stomach with a dull thud.

Abe sat across from her, as cool and collected as ever in a ridiculous green and blue paisley suit. Abe, her father.

"I was wondering when you'd be back," she offered, closing out of the document and pulling up Instagram. Any attempts at focusing on real work had just been shot in the face. Her eyes slid back to her phone.

If he was as nervous as she, it was impossible to see. "They don't call me Zmey for no reason."

"Mm," she hummed as she took an overhead photo of her half-finished breakfast and then artfully cropped it. While swiping through filters and photo settings, she added, "And here I was, thinking you were scared off by me catching you and my mother chatting it up like a couple of long-lost lovers."

"It has been a long time since anything scared me."

Her thumbs hovered her phone's keyboard as she mulled over both Abe and a caption. Now that she knew the truth, she could see the resemblance between them — the eyes and hair were the most obvious, but her nose was more like his. He was leaned back in his chair like a king, though that didn't stop her from catching the way he was studying her, like he, too, was looking for similarities.

"And what's a long time to you?" She raised an eyebrow, the second joining halfway. "Twenty-three years?"

His smile felt to her like it was bordering on prideful. "Your mother wasn't some quick affair to me, Rose."

"Do you regret it?" she asked, blowing right past everything she had actually wanted to say and ask. "Not raising me or being in my life?"

"No."

 _And I thought the bluntness came from my mother._

Her other eyebrow joined the first by way of asking for him to elaborate.

"It was mutually understood from the moment she told me that I wouldn't — couldn't — be involved in your life. I was the one who said it aloud. A child was never in my plans, and your mother was in a similar predicament. Regardless, I was about to take over my father's business, and I had no intention of giving up something I did want for something I wasn't sure of."

"And I'm sure that that would be insulting to literally anyone else," Rose replied, trying and failing to not think about her recent pregnancy scare.

Abe only smiled in response, a snaking thing winding through his mouth but not quite reaching his eyes. His eyes followed her as she set her phone down and took a sip of her chai. "For what it's worth, your mother wasn't particularly maternal, either. She felt similarly, though I imagine it was harder for her to leave you at school after getting some time with you. There's something about small children that pulls you in and attaches you to them without your consent."

"I wouldn't know," Rose replied smoothly, also failing at not imagining her and Dimitri dropping off a hypothetical child at school after a summer at home, before she returned to Court and resumed her job as Lissa's guardian. She felt as though she was able to grasp some of the magnitude of her mother leaving her to be raised by an academy. It suddenly seemed like the bravest thing her mother could have done.

"No? As I seem to recall, you're teaching English to a couple of small children. I find it impossible to believe you're not attached to them in some way."

Zoya and Katya flashed through Rose's mind, followed closely by Alexei. The girls' mothers had decided it was time to start at St. Basil's in the fall, a thought that caught Rose off-guard. She didn't realize she would miss them until she was faced with the idea of not seeing them every day.

"I thought of you often," Abe continued after a moment, pulling her out of her thoughts. "It was impossible to forget about my only child. And I remained informed of what you were up to. I was the first to figure out where you and the Queen had run off to during your truancy. I almost sought you out then."

 _What?_

"So why didn't you?"

"Victor Dashkov and his psi-hounds. You two fled before I had the chance to get to Chicago, and I figured it was for the best. You had a lot on your plate as it was. I decided that having your long-absent father show up out of nowhere would complicate things. I'll admit to feeling relieved when I heard you two had been picked up and taken back to school."

Seeing emotion on Abe's face was too discomforting for Rose's liking. "So what, you decided _now_ was a better time? When I'm alone and isolated? There's a whole series of after-school specials on cornering impressionable young women by themselves, you know."

He laughed. "Rose, you are anything but impressionable and alone. No, when I found out you'd be in Baia for a year on a classified project for the Queen, my initial decision was to avoid coming here. This isn't a place that has needed me in quite some time. I only return when Yeva Belikova asks me to. She's crafty, that one. I wouldn't be surprised if the humans around here base their witches' tales on her."

"You really stuck by that decision," Rose noted dryly, ignoring his musings.

"Yeva had a dream," Abe started.

Rose rolled her eyes. "Of course she did." Aside from a handful of weird interactions, Rose hadn't seen evidence that the old woman was some kind of future-seeing witch like everyone claimed.

"She was telling me about it on the day you arrived. I figured it was already too late for me to slip out of town by then. No doubt you would've heard of my reputation by then."

"Modesty becomes you yet again."

"Thank you."

"So you flew in from wherever—"

"Prague."

"Of course. So you flew in from Prague just to listen to a nearly eighty-year-old woman ramble about some dream she had and then, when you realized your daughter, the one whose life you've been completely absent from up until that moment, was a few blocks away, you decided to play Sneak Up On the Guardian and spend ten minutes spewing cryptic shit before leaving, only to come back every so often with your secret safely hidden until said daughter catches you getting cozy with her mother, who you haven't spoken to in equally as long, at which point, you take off for a month and a half before you decide to own up to your actions, and yet you still can't even say, 'Hi Rose, I'm your father'." Rose sucked in a deep breath, amazed she'd said all that in one breath. "Do I have that right?"

Abe didn't look the slightest bit ruffled. "That about sums it up, yes."

Finally, Rose understood why everyone lost their shit around her when she treated even the most serious of situations with an unaffected nonchalance. She could feel her mood rapidly slipping, anger to hurt to crying to exasperation to disbelief, almost faster than she could feel. She stood, grabbing her phone.

"This doesn't change anything," she said firmly. "I've gone this long without knowing you. I'm not some little girl looking for her daddy, nor some teenager trying to figure herself out. I'm twenty-three. I've got some idea of who I am and what I want by now." It was a struggle to keep the tears at bay. "I just… I need some time to process all of this."

He nodded. "I understand."

"Good." Her fist balled up as she strode for the door, a flurry of emotions clouding her vision. Distantly, as she made her way outside and down the street, she realized her phone was ringing.

"What?" she snapped at whoever was on the other end.

"Rose? It's Lissa."


	7. Chapter Seven

Massive shout-out to my beta, Amy ( sagemb - AO3/tumblr), for literally typing up this chapter for me to get me moving on putting it up. I'm working two jobs to afford a cross-USA move & my laptop's hard drive died, so I've been understandably strapped for time/ability in working on this. But alas! Tomorrow the laptop issue is being addressed (finally) and I've got all of chapter eight typed, so the next one should be faster. Thanks for your patience!

* * *

 _"Rose? It's Lissa."_

"I'm at the doctor," Lissa continued. She sounded like she was still trying to process something. It made Rose slow her steps and was a welcome distraction from her anger at Abe - her father - just moments ago.

"Are you alright?" The bond was pretty hard to touch at the moment then, but Rose would bet money that she felt fear and disbelief from Lissa. "Is everything okay? Are you hurt?"

"No, Rose, I'm fine," Lissa soothed and Rose was able to relax for half a second until Lissa added, "I'm pregnant."

"What?" _Oh my god._ "How did that happen?"

"Well, you see, Rose, when two people love each other very much…"

"I can't believe you're joking about this," Rose said. "That's my job."

"I have to, or else I'm going to fucking lose it."

There was the trembling voice Rose knew so well. "Do you not-"

"No, no, I'm happy about this. Very happy, actually. It takes some of the pressure off Jill to stay alive, at least until I can get the quorum law repealed."

"Then why are you freaking out?"

"Because Queens aren't supposed to have children out of wedlock."

"Do you know when you're due?"

"January."

A month after the wedding date.

"I have no idea what to do," Lissa said quietly.

"That's-" Rose narrowly dodged a car running a red light as she crossed the street, flipping the driver off and shouting a swear she'd heard from various Belikovs in the past. "That's tough. Does anyone else know?"

"Christian is here with me. Well, not at the moment. I think he's in the bathroom having a panic attack. This is a little sooner than when we planned on having kids."

"So you're definitely keeping it?"

"I know it's not what's easiest, but… I can't imagine not. Besides, as difficult enough as it is for Moroi to conceive, we don't want to waste the opportunity, y'know?"

Rose idly wondered how Lissa would react to Karolina's casual abortion suggestion a week ago.

"Jill knows, too. I went to her when I first suspected. She talked me down from the ledge, got me a couple pregnancy tests. I took, like, five, and they all said yes. This doctor appointment was just to confirm."

Well that explained the weird pause in Rose's phone call with Jill a week ago.

"When was this?" Rose asked.

"Twelve days ago." Lissa _would_ be the type to count the days. "I didn't want to say anything until I knew for certain. I'm sure you've got enough on your plate at the moment."

Rose's first instinct was to deflect Lissa's concern, reassure her that one would always care what was going on with her best friend, but she stopped herself. If she truly wanted to find herself and be her own person, she couldn't also be Lissa's emotional sounding board every time she had a problem.

"I keep busy," Rose replied instead.

"How are you?" Lissa asked, sounding grateful for the chance to change the conversation. "I know we haven't talked recently."

A roll of nausea cut off whatever answer Rose would've given, clicking the final piece of the puzzle together. "Actually, it's funny you should call me about this."

"What, you're not-"

"No." Anxiety at the thought of being pregnant welled up and Rose took a deep breath to pull herself back together. She had all the confirmation she needed that it wasn't her morning sickness. Time to grow up and stop freaking out about it. "I thought I was for a couple of days, but you've cleared things up for me. I've been-still am-pretty nauseous for the past week. Some puking, too. Last time I worshipped the porcelain gods this much, I was a freshman at my first high school party."

The sound of the door opening came muffled over the line followed by Lissa asking Christian if he was okay and Christian assuring her that he was.

"I'm sorry," Lissa said to Rose when she came back to the phone. "I was wondering how this would work, with the bond."

"Have you not had morning sickness?"

"I did. It was worse about a week ago. I guess you're only going to feel it if it gets bad."

"Yeah, well, let me know when your boobs start getting sore so I can be ready."

"Other than this, you're okay?"

"Yeah, I'm doing fine, I guess."

Murmuring on the other end between her and Christian. "Rose, listen, I'm really sorry."

"For what?"

"That you were pressured into putting the brakes on a relationship with Dimitri."

"That was months ago," Rose lied, thinking back to her conversation with him the previous night. "Why are you bringing it up now?"

"I've just been thinking lately, about how Christian and I are getting married and Jill and Eddie are having a baby in a few months and Adrian and Sydney are seriously talking about moving. All your friends… we all have a person, someone we can share our days and lives with and you're out there, on your own. I don't know, it didn't hit me how lonely that could be until the other day."

Rose was silent. It wasn't like she needed to correct Lissa.

"And then you're told no, you can't even make a connection with another person. I don't know. Like I said, I've been thinking a lot. It's got to be really hard."

 _If you only knew how not lonely I am._

"It doesn't change anything, I know," Lissa was saying. Rose couldn't tell if Lissa was aware of her silence. "But I want you to know I'm aware and I feel for you."

"Thank you," Rose replied, not the least bit guilty about not mentioning that she and Dimitri were actually a legitimate couple now, as far as either of them were concerned. Still, the sentiment that Lissa was thinking about her perspective-even explicitly saying so-was comforting.

"Oh! I remember now-earlier, I asked how you were, you kind of insinuated you'd thought you were pregnant for a hot second…what did you mean by that? I thought it was weird, but I might have misheard you."

Rose froze, replaying the conversation… no, she hadn't implied anything. She'd actually said the words _I thought I was._ "I've been puking-" Truth. "And my period was late." Lie, it had shown up a few hours after her test, the day it should have. "So I freaked. Doesn't every girl worry about Immaculate Conception when she's late?"

Lissa laughed. Good. Better than having to explain herself or invent some imaginary lover completely unconnected to Baia or the Belikovs.

"I have to get back to work," Lissa said. There was some rustling on the other end. "Call me next week if I don't. We haven't really chatted in a while."

Rose went down a mental list of everything Lissa didn't know. Dimitri. Being a bridesmaid for Karolina. Abe being her father. She found she really didn't want to share any of that with Lissa. It was nice having some stuff to herself.

"I will," Rose promised.

"Adrian did the math, by the way," Lissa said, tone indicating this was indeed the last thing. "You'll be back home twenty-four weeks from yesterday."

"That's still six months away," Rose said dryly, turning onto the Belikovs' street.

"I know," Lissa sighed. "I just miss you a lot."

"I miss you, too," Rose said, more an automatic reflex than any kind of genuine response. Rose really hadn't felt any kind of homesickness or longing to be back with her friends since Sydney and Eddie had shown up in the middle of the night for a surprise trip to St. Basil's two months prior, and she realized that as she approached the house she was starting to think of as 'home'.

"Alright, I really have to go now. Call me next week!"

"I will," Rose laughed. "Bye, Liss."

* * *

[They] at least claimed to practice "participant observation."… In rhetoric, it is called an oxymoron: to observe while participating, or to participate while observing, is about as obvious as savoring a burning hot ice cream.… Although during my fieldwork I never knew what I was doing or why, I am struck today by the clarity of my methodological choices at the time: it all took place as if I had decided to make "participation" a tool for understanding. In all my meetings…I let myself be affected, without trying to inquire or even to understand and remember.

\- Jeanne Favret-Saada, _Unbewitching as Therapy_ (1989)

* * *

Her encounter with Abe was still bothering her a week later, so after running a couple of errands for Olena, Rose curled up on one of the rickety folding chairs that made up the back porch and called Dimitri.

He answered almost immediately. The sound of chatter filled the background. "Belikov."

"Is this a bad time?" she asked, voice catching. They spoke twice a week, but she was missing him particularly hard that afternoon.

"No, no, it's never a bad time for you to call, Roza." The chatter faded as he spoke. "You're crying."

"I, um…" She sniffed loudly, dragging her free hand against her nose. "I talked to Abe a week ago. Apparently he's my dad. Father. I have no idea what to call him."

"Call him whatever feels right." It'd only been a couple days since she last talked to him, but hearing his warm, gentle voice soothed away some of her rougher emotional edges.

"It feels wrong to call him Dad."

"Then don't. I've always believed that anyone can father a child but they have to be earn being called anything else. It's one of the few things my father taught me."

It made sense. "I'm surprised you let that man teach you anything."

"None of it comes from a good place, I'll give you that."

That elicited a laugh from her.

"It's something I live by, though, among other rules."

"What else?"

"Respect those who call you family, so long as the relationship is healthy. If you feel the need to resort to physical violence, you need to remove yourself from the situation, Strigoi notwithstanding." He paused for a heartbeat. "Treat the woman you love like the goddess she is."

She smiled, most of her earlier agitation gone. "Goddess, huh?"

"Roza, you couldn't be further out of my league. I wake up every day amazed that you've let me this far into your life."

By then, she was full-out grinning. There was a sincerity in his words that deepened them past the flirty pick-ups guys had used on her in the past.

"Don't worry, comrade, half the time I'm convinced I've made you up in my head. You're too perfect to exist."

"I am far from perfect, Roza." He had to miss her as much as she was him - never had he used her nickname so much. She wasn't about to complain though; every time he said it, she floated a little bit higher.

"You're all the perfect I need," Rose said, feeling like she would suffocate if she didn't get the words out.

He sucked in a breath. "I miss you so much."

"I do, too. More than you can imagine."

"Do you want to talk about your conversation with Abe?"

Damn. He'd done such a good job of distracting her.

"It's okay if you don't want to," he added.

She pulled her phone away. It was a little after two and lunch still wasn't ready, something Olena had apologized for when Rose ducked out to make the phone call. There was still time to talk. "No, no, I do."

She recounted her meeting, taking comfort in his steady breathing on the other end. When she finished, she felt little more than mentally drained. "I don't know what to do," she said quietly.

"I think you're doing the best you can, given the situation. You said yourself that you needed some time. Talking helps, too, so I'm glad you called me. You can and should reach out to people. There's no reason to go through this alone."

"I'm not alone," Rose said automatically, wanting him to know how she felt. "Not when I have you."

"Good. That's…good." He sounded like he was struggling for words.

"Cat got your tongue?" she teased.

"That…makes no sense. At all."

"You were having a hard time with speech there," she clarified.

"I was having a hard time trying to express…I don't even know anymore."

"So this would be the twelfth time I've left you speechless since you went back to work."

"No, it's the eleventh."

"Um, it's definitely the twelfth."

"Um, it's definitely the eleventh."

"Don't mock me, at least not until you work on that atrocious American accent. Also, it's definitely the twelfth, or did you forget that night you called me last week?"

"…You're right on this one. But I'm still winning fifteen to twelve, so it really doesn't matter."

"Of course it does," Rose said, pretending to be offended. "There's a huge margin between fifteen to twelve and fifteen to eleven."

"Yes, because one is such a huge gap."

"You're impossible to catch off guard."

"You're just straight up impossible."

"Mm, but I have it on good authority you like that side of me."

"I like every side of you. Except the spontaneous side. That one terrifies me sometimes."

"Oh? And why is that?"

"That's the side of you that will probably be the death of me when you make me jump out of an airplane."

"Well now you're just giving me ideas," she teased.

He swore in Russian. "Forget I ever said anything."

"Too late, comrade. That's gonna be our twelfth real first date."

"I still think shark cage diving would pose less of a threat to our lives."

" _Boring_ ," she drawled. "I want to see you wrestle a shark. I think you could take one on. You're big enough."

"This is a ridiculous conversation."

"Yeah, but it's fun to think about, especially considering the fact that neither of us have had a vacation in years."

He sighed. "I know I say it a thousand times whenever we talk, but I really do miss you, ridiculous conversations and all."

"It _is_ more fun when we can plan imaginary vacations in person."

"It's only fifty-six more days."

She didn't mention how the family was coming up early for Vika's graduation. Better to surprise him. It would be more fun for him.

"If we _could_ go on a ridiculous vacation, where would you want to go?"

She dug a toe into the ground, grateful that the weather had finally been warming up recently. "What are my parameters?"

"None. You can go anywhere, do anything. Money's not an issue."

She thought about it. "I don't know. As long as it was us, I wouldn't care. We could hole up in some cabin on a mountain for a week and it would be the best vacation of my life."

"A cabin on a mountain?" He asked in disbelief. "I feel like you'd get bored within five minutes."

"Yeah, okay, well, I wouldn't if there was Internet. And TV. And someone to cook me breakfast," she added, looking up to see Zoya poking her head out of the back door and whispering that lunch was ready to eat. Rose nodded back in understanding and the girl dashed off.

"That's a lot of conditions."

"You asked."

"I did ask, you're right," he laughed.

Grinning, she bit her lip. "Can I call you back in a little bit? Lunch is calling my name and a growing girl needs food."

"Understandable. You are pretty short as it is."

"Hey. I'm not short, you're just freakishly tall."

"So that's a no on talking to you in the shower later."

She rolled her eyes as she entered the house. "Good-bye Dimitri. I'll call you tonight."

* * *

From: Rosemarie Hathaway

To: Marie Conta

CC: HRM Vasilisa Dragomir

Date: June 22 at 18:48

Subject: Interviews

Attached are the final two interviews. My apologies for their delay - I've been under the weather the past month or so, a fact Her Majesty can attest to.

Regards,

Guardian R Hathaway


	8. Chapter Eight

I'm back! I promise!

If you've been paying attention: our date is about lined up to the date in the story.

* * *

"—and so then I was thinking that maybe—"

"Rose."

"What?"

"I'm happy you're happy, but you've done nothing but talk about Dimitri for the past hour."

". . . I have?"

"Yes, little dhampir, you have. I switched the subject to unicorns about twenty minutes ago and then timed how long it took for you to circle back around to him."

"You did?"

A laugh. "Yeah. Two minutes and seventeen seconds. I'm kind of impressed."

"I'm sorry. There's two weeks until I get to see him and I'm crawling out of my skin with excitement."

"Don't be sorry. You're in love. God only knows how much you had to put up with me calling you about Sydney every night she was gone. Two weeks, you said?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Maybe you'll calm down on Facebook."

"…What does _that_ mean?"

"It means you're posting every twenty minutes with every little thought you have. It's clear you're excited about something. And…on a similar note, while I'm thinking about it, you should probably try to tone it down _anyway_. Lissa's getting suspicious. You haven't told her, yet, have you?"

"Shit." Rose readjusted her phone before continuing to fold her laundry. "No, um, only you and Sydney know for sure. My mother, too, but I don't talk to her about personal stuff like this. I only told you guys because I'm fairly certain his family would suffocate me in my sleep if I didn't find someone else to talk to about him."

"So as far as Lissa knows, you broke up with Dimitri back in January and haven't reconciled at all."

"Yep."

"You're going to have to come clean at some point, you know that, right?"

"Mhm."

"But you don't want to deal with it right now."

"Uh-huh."

"Because it's much easier to suck his dick than worry about the future."

"You got it."

"Then welcome back to the Bad Decisions Club. The annual membership fee is a single big lie that will probably ruin your closest relationships and perks include feeling great at the time and feeling like shit afterwards."

Rose set down the shirt she'd folded, smiling softly. "You're such a dork, Adrian," she said.

"You love me."

"Yeah, you're basically the annoying older brother I never got."

"Love you too, Rose."

* * *

She kept herself busy — running both in the morning and at night; English lessons with Zoya and Katya and teaching their friends a couple words whenever they had playdates; helping Mark and Oksana with their garden; letting Karolina and Alex bounce wedding ideas off of her and, along with Sonya, playing counselor when they got into fights over ridiculous things like cake flavors and whether or not to invite certain people; submitting her thrice weekly reports; assisting Olena in the daily routines of cooking, baking, laundry, errands — but always, always her mind wandered back to Dimitri and what he was up to and how he was doing.

* * *

A road trip with nine people was already a nightmare in choreographing, packing, and executing in itself; when a third of the group were small children under the age of six, chaos took on a whole new meaning. Rose hadn't realized the extent of this until she offered to check on the girls after Karolina nearly threw a fit when Alex pointed out the time and how they really needed to start heading out the door.

She'd somehow never been in Zoya and Katya's bedroom, and after she knocked on the door and was let in by Alexei, she almost walked right back out.

If she thought Sonya and Karolina's room across the hall was a mess on a good day, their daughters certainly took the award for Actually A Disaster. Clothes and books and toys strewn everywhere and what seemed to be Katya's bed had more crayons buried in it than a Crayola factory — Rose was surprised she could even see the little monsters.

Alexei took up residence in the corner by the door after letting Rose in, falling back into being engrossed by a doll that Rose was pretty sure belonged to Katya, who was jumping on her bed, laughing and shrieking. Zoya was half dressed in socks and a pink poofy skirt, standing in front of a dresser and tearing clothes out faster than Rose could register what each item looked like, chattering away to Katya about how she had absolutely _nothing_ to wear.

"Hey!"

Nothing changed. Rose tried to get their attention a few more times and when all else failed, she stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled loudly, knowing she'd get a response.

Katya fell to the bed, eyes wide, and Zoya turned around slowly, like Rose had just admitted to killing a man. Even Alexei, usually so hard to break from his trances, looked up. Immediately, the girls dove to floor, looking under the dresser and their beds.

"Guys, there aren't any cockroaches, c'mon, get up."

"There are no cockroaches _yet_ ," Zoya replied, totally miffed. Katya eyed Rose warily but stood back up nonetheless.

"Have either of you eaten dinner yet?" Rose asked.

They shook their heads.

"Are you even packed?"

Zoya pointed to a mound of clothes next to her bed. "We were, but I wanted my purple shirt, but then I couldn't find it."

Rose heaved a sigh. "Alright, let's get you dressed. I'll repack while you eat."

* * *

An hour later, after Katya got into it with Sonya over having oatmeal for dinner and Zoya insisted on another three outfit changes and Alexei had a silent meltdown over almost not riding in the same car as Rose and Alex, they sat at the table for the customary pre-trip moment of silence, and Rose felt like she was about to burst from being only hours away from seeing Dimitri.

* * *

The three hours to St. Basil's were almost torturous — Rose fidgeted the entire time, unable to get comfortable in the backseat between Zoya and Alexei — but finally, mercifully, they arrived.

Everything was rich green and in full bloom in the dying sunlight, bringing color to a landscape that had been stuck in Rose's memory as stark, barren, and monotone. The grass, no longer covered by a foot of snow, was freshly cut and looked thick and pillow soft.

They'd stayed up overnight to drive straight to the academy with minimal stopping time and arrived around the academy's breakfast time along with a couple other families. Alex dealt with checking everyone in, giving Rose a wink when he offered to take her suitcase up to the room so she could go explore with everyone else.

She knew from the schedule for the week that Dimitri had sent her that if he wasn't at breakfast already, he'd be on his way there after getting out of an early staff meeting, and when she fell in with the crush of students heading into the dining hall, she saw she was right. Through the door to the faculty dining room, she spotted him deep in conversation with Anton and a couple other guardians. Even just seeing him across a room sent her heart racing. He was so, so close, but he was here, in person, and she was looking at him with her own two eyes.

They'd developed an uncanny sense of knowing when the other was around — Rose was sure that in a mob of people the size of Texas, they would still be able to find each other. Guardians and teachers were moving in and out of the faculty dining room almost constantly, so there was no reason for Dimitri to look up when she entered in behind a couple other people, except he did, and the way his whole being lit up at seeing her sent her flying into his arms.

"You're here," he whispered, face buried in her neck, no doubt breathing in more of her hair than anything else. The past three and half months melted away and Rose sank into his hold, arms around his neck and hands grasping tightly the back of his shirt.

"I am, I'm here," she murmured, lips pressed to the corner of his jaw, just below his ear. She understood now what he meant when he'd told her that she made him feel safe. Looking back, she realized she'd always felt like she was about to fly apart whenever he wasn't around. It wasn't until she was pressed against him, balanced on her toes to make up for the height difference, that she felt whole and together.

He pulled back, awe and wonder and love and so many other things she'd missed seeing on his face, his grin matching her own. "Hi. I missed you."

"I missed you, too."

If he hadn't had both arms securely around her waist, she would've fallen over — the hug put her back together, but the kiss was like coming home. The world made sense again.

Someone cleared their throat when they didn't part after a few moments and Rose broke away, lost in the depths of Dimitri's eyes and naïvely worried she might never get the chance again. Dimitri's cheeks were tinged pink and Rose found herself wanting to kiss away the embarrassment. Around him, it was stupidly easy to forget the rest of the world existed.

Including Anton.

"This reunion is cute, but I'm trying to eat," he deadpanned, and it shook both of them enough to remember themselves.

"Sorry," Rose said, nodding her thanks to the guardian who shifted one seat down so she could sit next to Dimitri, who'd taken hold of her hand and hadn't let go, despite the move forcing him to eat with his left hand. "We haven't seen each other in a while."

"I know." Anton was smiling, though. "Mitya hasn't shut up about going home to see you for the past month."

Rose, still grinning, dug her face into Dimitri's shoulder. His usual scent — aftershave and the outdoors, mixed with a tiny bit of leather and something Rose had come to associate with his seemingly endless collection of novels — centered her. She looked up, resting her chin against his arm and clasping his hand in both of hers in her lap. His hair was pulled back, probably to keep it off his neck, and his eyes darted her way almost constantly, like he wanted to do nothing but look at her even though he was technically on duty. He was just as gorgeous as ever.

"I haven't either," she admitted, still looking at him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw he'd doubled the speed at which he'd been eating and excitement surged through her. He was off-duty for the rest of the day and night until he presumably had to arrive for trials the following morning, and she had no doubt he wanted to spend every minute of that with her.

"How was the drive?" asked Anton, still giving them a canary-eating-cat grin.

Rose extracted a hand long enough to swipe Dimitri's bread. It still wasn't as good as Olena's. "Long. I'm surprised we made it out of the house with everyone alive."

"Karo stressing out about the wedding next month?" Dimitri asked.

Rose nodded, her mouth full of bread. "You coming?" she asked Anton after swallowing.

"If I can get the time off, I will," he replied, stabbing a thick slice of _kolbasa_.

"Did my grandmother come or did she stay home?" Dimitri asked before proceeding to drain his cup of coffee in two gulps.

"She, uh, she stayed in Baia," Rose said, fumbling over her words as she watched his Adam's apple dip with each swallow he took. "Said she's watched enough tattooing ceremonies to last her a lifetime."

Dimitri laughed and Rose's heart lifted at the sound. "I have to go check out with Sosnitsky," he said, moving to stand up, tray in hand. "I'll meet you outside."

Rose felt like she floated the whole way to his room.

* * *

The two lone female dhampirs in Rose's year at St. Vladimir's had both been novices and so they'd all gone through trials and the promise mark ceremony like their male counterparts. St. Basil's graduating class was a different story — in the nearly hundred dhampirs graduating, a third were girls and of those, only a handful were novices. As a result, there was a separate variation of the trials and tattooing ceremony for all those who were only testing for their graduation mark; Viktoria was in this latter group.

The not-trials were held in the gym and looked more like a martial arts competition than the high-stakes simulation Rose had gone through. After demonstrating knowledge of basic strikes and blocks — stuff Rose remembered learning before she'd even reached novice status — the group broke into partners for sparring, and someone had decided to turn it into a tournament for fun given that nobody was being scored, unlike the novices across campus.

Families filled in along the edges of the gym, mostly mothers and sisters and, in some cases like the Belikovs', small children. Alex was one of the few males above age five, and Rose was surprised he didn't even get weird looks, let alone have anyone say something about it.

If anything, Rose felt like _she_ was the one under a microscope — she'd piled her hair on top of her head in a semi-formal bun to get it out of her face after waking up too late to shower before breakfast, and even sitting against the wall with Alexei in her lap, her own marks burned hot against her skin. She'd definitely caught several whispers when she'd first entered and while she wrote it off as to people reacting to her simply being there — _the power of one's reputation_ , she mused — she saw enough people gesturing and touching the back of their necks to get what they were really talking about.

If only Viktoria were a novice. Nobody would look at her oddly for being at the full trials, plus she'd get the bonus of watching Dimitri, who'd been among the guardians selected to play Strigoi.

Regardless of how she was graduating, Rose would easily admit that Viktoria looked good for coming back to school after taking five years off. Her lines were clean and her movements decisive and forceful. In the sparring tournament, which took up most of the the morning, Rose found herself rooting for Viktoria with the rest of her family and was just as bummed as everyone else when she got knocked out in the second to last round.

Viktoria wasn't nearly as disappointed. She dropped down next to Rose breathless, half angled towards the competition, and Alexei climbed into his mother's lap without a word of protest that she was drenched in sweat. "I got to kick Ksenia Ivanova in the stomach," she explained with a shrug. "Today's a good day." She took a bottle of water from Sonya with a nod, gulped down half as she watched the last two girls center up for the final match, and shouted what sounded like encouragement to one of them, a hand over Alexei's exposed ear. "You're coming tonight, Rose, yes?"

She nodded. "Wouldn't miss it."

"How many novices did you graduate with?" Karolina asked, eyes fixed on where Zoya and Katya were playing Doctor and Patient with their dolls, which mostly consisted of pretending to amputate different parts of the dolls' bodies with their fingers.

"Maybe thirty?" Rose considered. "I would say the Moroi-dhampir ratio in Viktoria's group is what mine was, but flipped."

"Makes sense." Viktoria tugged on Alex's jeans leg. "You can come, too, right?"

Alex's sharp nod was the kind that said he didn't want to discuss it. "I'll be there."

"Have fun sitting through a hundred tattoos," Karolina said dryly, turning back to the match.

* * *

The dhampir ceremony was just as stoic and formal as Rose's, although it was certainly much larger. With so many graduating, a cap had been put on attendees — graduates were each allowed one guest and an open invite had unofficially gone out to any guardian on campus who wanted to drop by. Viktoria had given her guest ticket to Olena and asked Rose and Alex to come, the only two with promise marks among all her visitors.

Rose had already been planning on going — partly for Viktoria, partly because standing in the same room as Dimitri was better than keeping herself busy without him for several hours, and partly because, as an established guardian in the field, showing support and recognition for all her new colleagues seemed like the right thing to do, as weird as the thought was to her.

Every summer, in three separate waves, newly minted guardians flooded Court for two weeks, getting oriented in their new positions and receiving their assignments. Last August, Hans Croft had even asked Rose to lead the tours of Court's guardian headquarters in an effort to give her more to do, playing off the irony of his request with a wry smile.

Standing along the back wall next to Alex with Alexei on her hip, waiting for the ceremony to start, Rose considered where she was now. Where would she be next summer? What would she be doing? Paul would be graduating, so she'd see him at Court. That was also going to be weird.

"I can take him," Alex offered when Rose shifted her weight, and she shook her head. Viktoria had insisted on someone sneaking in Alexei, adamant that her son see his mother graduate, delayed as it may have been. On the other hand, it meant someone had to hold him so he could see over all the heads, and despite her strength and endurance, holding a five-year-old wasn't easy work.

"What, and give up ten minutes in? Nice try, but no." Rose stuck her tongue out at Alex, smiling when Alexei laughed at her antics. "You thought that was funny?" she teased, and Alexei nodded, a smile still on his face.

The ceremony was taking place in the same ballroom Rose had received her temporary assignment back in March and a small stage had been erected in the front of the room. It was there that the graduating class stood in three neat, even rows, chattering excitedly amongst themselves. Trials had gone all day and those whose names came later in the alphabet looked rougher than the others, like they'd only been given a few minutes to clean up after coming in off the field. The lights were dimmed and even though they were in the back, where few people would be near them, Rose had a feeling the setting was a bit too overwhelming for Alexei to feel comfortable to speak aloud. Viktoria was going to consider getting a laugh out of him a big victory.

Moments later, Dimitri appeared in the space to Rose's right. He exchanged greetings with Alex, the pair giving each other that back-clapping, one-armed hug that seemed universal among guys, then leaned against the wall.

"Are you done for the day?" Alex asked.

Dimitri nodded. "They don't need me for this. It pretty much runs itself." His eyes were locked on Rose throughout the exchange — more specifically, he was looking at her holding Alexei, and his eyes were completely unreadable.

Guilt flashed through Rose and she covered it up with a smile when he rested his hand on her lower back, a quiet, more subtle greeting for her given their setting. She'd never told him about her long weekend in May, about how Lissa's morning sickness had gotten so bad it bled over the bond, but only because she hadn't told him about Lissa's pregnancy. Lissa, Christian, and her team of personal advisors — including her wedding planner and personal secretary, because one could never have as many people in on a secret as possible — had all been waiting to hit the twelve week mark before making a decision, and now they were waiting until she began showing to make the announcement. She'd just started hitting that point and Rose didn't need the bond to know that the rumor mill was circulating at full speed the past few weeks.

As far as Dimitri knew, she'd gotten hit by a weird stomach bug that had taken a while to shake off. She knew she'd have to explain it'd been bond-induced morning sickness after Lissa's announcement — there was no way anyone in their world wouldn't hear about the Queen getting pregnant, especially since she was still only engaged.

This all left her acutely aware that she was holding a young child and that Dimitri was probably fighting the mental image of it being _their_ child and not Alexei… or something. He was doing an exceptional job of keeping himself emotionless otherwise. He also had a couple bruises and scratches and Rose reached out to trace the edge of a bandage above his left eye.

"Rough day?" she asked coyly and he shook his head in exasperation, catching her fingers in his hand and kissing the inside of her palm with a soft grin, a smaller version of the Rose-only smile that made her knees weak.

"You should have seen me during their field experience," he replied, threading their fingers together and bringing them back down to their side.

Memories of punching Stan Alto in the face floated through her mind, a smile appearing on her face. "I would be disappointed if you weren't all bloody and beaten then."

He eyed her, amusement mixed with fond appreciation. "I'm sure you were one of the ones we specifically prepare for."

"And who would that be?"

"The novices who had a bone to pick with their instructors."

Up on the stage, someone was calling for attention, and Rose rolled her eyes at Dimitri. "I didn't—okay, yeah, stop looking at me like that, I definitely fought with, like, all of them on a near constant basis. School and I didn't get along."

"You don't get along with authority figures in general," Dimitri replied, still half smiling, and when she rolled her eyes again and shifted Alexei to her other hip, disentangling their hands in the process, the smile turned into a full one. "Ironic, really, given your career."

"You're lucky I have no interest in punching you," Rose murmured, making a face that said she knew he had her figured out. "Your face is too…" She trailed off, unsure of how to accurately describe his face. "I couldn't possibly bring myself to ruin perfection."

Silence finally fell, tearing from Dimitri any chance he might've had to reply.

Three tattoo artists had come out and were finally finished setting up, an assistant standing off to the side. Guardian Sosnitsky was standing in the front left corner of the stage, and once he saw peace and quiet settled over the room, he began reading aloud names and, if applicable, trials scores.

Viktoria was fourth in what Rose had quickly figured out was the non-novice lines, and without realizing it, she was beaming the entire time Viktoria was getting tattooed. Dimitri was, too, as was Alex; Alexei watched from where he'd tucked his head into Rose's neck, a spot she was used to him hiding his face in when her hair was down. To a stranger, she probably looked just as much one of Viktoria's family members as the men on either side of her, and, watching Viktoria descend the stage, fingers delicately brushing the back of her neck, Rose decided that she was okay with the idea.


	9. Chapter Nine

Here's a nice lengthy chapter to make up for the fact that I suck at updating these days. (Thanks for sticking with me!)

* * *

"I think your mother would cease to exist if she didn't have a party to plan and host every month," Rose muttered into her cup when Dimitri sat down on the bottom step of the stairs, his long legs nearly touching the opposite wall when he stretched them out.

Olena had decided it was life or death if Viktoria didn't have a graduation party, and just like every other celebration, nearly the entire dhampir population of Baia and then some had turned out. Viktoria's party was the first of many penned in on the family kitchen calendar; many weren't even in Baia, but in other towns, hours away.

She scooted one step down, her legs on either side of him. His torso, she'd discovered, was ridiculously long; despite sitting on the step above him, it was a stretch to rest her chin on his shoulder, and so she settled for wrapping her free arm around his front and resting her head against the top of his back.

"Alexei's appointment is the second, right?"

"Yeah." He threaded their fingers together, rubbing his thumb against hers.

"So we're leaving on the . . . thirty-first?"

"Yeah."

She pressed forward even more, as flat against his back as she could get, and managed to close enough remaining distance to hook her chin on his shoulder. "You haven't kissed me since this morning."

"You make it sound like that's a crime."

"It is." She shifted when he twisted to look at her. "I don't have much time left with you."

His response was immediate. "You have all the time with me that you want," he replied, eyebrows knitting together in confusion.

"No, I mean, like . . ." She shook her head. "We've got the next month and then the next time you've got a break from work . . . I'll be back in the States."

He said nothing, kissed her soft and slow, sweet as the sun shining on the lush, green backyard outside. The anxiety building in her began to melt away. She was being ridiculous. Five weeks was a long time. Worrying about the future would do her no good.

But was she being ridiculous or was she being practical? They were going to have to talk about it at some point, that her home address was fixed in the United States, nearly six thousand miles from where she sat at the moment. Deep down, she knew she would fight for what they'd been building, that she'd do everything in her power to keep their love alive despite the distance, and most of her was sure Dimitri felt the same.

But at what cost? His plans, at least in the short-term, seemed to be stay on at St. Basil's, which was honorable — someone had to educate and look after the next generation. If he had long-terms plans, she certainly was never able to get a fix on what they might be. And Rose? She had one plan for her life that pretty much dictated everything else — she would be Lissa's guardian to the day she died or was forced into retirement, whichever came first. Trying to picture doing anything else was damn near an impossibility.

Calmness had settled deep in her bones when he finally pulled away, and she sucked her lips into her mouth, trying to keep the warm, pleasant feelings in. He tilted her chin up with his finger and said, "I know. I'm aware you've got a plane ticket with your name on it for this November. We can talk about this more later, but just remember for right now that you're here and not there. Try to keep that in mind. If you focus on the countdown, you'll miss the journey along the way."

"You know you sound like a greeting card, right?" she asked, mouth twisting in a sardonic smile. "No, I take that back. You're more Buddha than Hallmark. It's like . . . Zen life lessons. On fortune cookies."

He laughed and kissed her again, smiling into it. "I don't know what I did before I met you, Rose Hathaway."

"Mm." She returned the kiss, a short peck to his mis mouth, his nose, his cheek. "I've heard it was really boring."

"That it was," he murmured, leaning into her embrace.

* * *

Dimitri had promised her a day out in Novosibirsk to stretch her legs since Viktoria and Alexei only left Anton's apartment when Alexei felt like it — which was decidedly not often. In the morning, she'd opted for her and Dimitri to just walk around the city, dipping in and out of parks filled with people soaking up what little summer they had; for lunch, they met up with Anton himself at a bar Dimitri swore by, and inside it was nearly as hot as it was outside.

" _Dobro pozhalovat_!" Anton greeted above the din, dropping perfunctory kisses on Rose's cheeks and clapping Dimitri's back.

A waitress was setting down shots of vodka as the three took seats at the table Anton had snagged in the middle of the bar. It was crowded — there were about forty tables shoved in a space meant for half as many — so Rose took it as an opportunity to sit closer to Dimitri than she normally did.

"To the food that is coming," Anton said, eyes darting to Rose as they all drank a shot. "Nata is, too."

"She's in town?" Dimitri asked, clearly surprised.

" _Da_." Anton nodded. "She's got some new guardian. I think they're dating. He's visiting his family and she came with him."

Dimitri's smile was wry behind his second shot before tipping it back. "So she found a knock-off version of me?" he asked, his twisted mouth the only sign he found it bitter.

"Something like that." Anton again glanced at Rose, who felt like she was missing something crucial to the conversation. "He's not as tall as you. Not as dark, brooding, or mysterious, either."

A cheese and bread plate was set in the middle of the table then, followed by a second plate of open-faced sandwiches piled thick with sliced sausage and tomatoes, cheese, and butter. Rose grabbed one, suddenly realizing how near-famished she was, and inhaled it, surfacing for air after three large bites and smirking when she saw Anton's raised eyebrow.

"I thought you said you were taking her to breakfast this morning," Anton said, leaned back in his chair and fingering a cracker's edge before popping it in his mouth.

"I did," Dimitri said, and Rose leaned into him when he kissed her temple, a softer smile on her face. "I'm also positive she needs twice as many calories as me to function."

"Please don't flatter yourself," she replied, downing the second shot now that she had food in her system. "It's all the sandwich." She picked up another one, brandishing it in the air. "I love this sandwich. I could marry this sandwich."

Something flickered in Dimitri's eyes, but before she could mention it, his attention was caught by something over her head. His face smoothed out, his affection tucking itself away; Anton was standing, and so Rose turned in her seat, jaw nearly dropping from surprise.

"Tasha?"

Siberia was the last place Rose would have ever expected to run into Natasha Ozera, Christian's aunt, but there she stood next to their table, in the flesh, the purple of her scars tamed down by a couple light layers of makeup.

"Rose." She laughed, a kind of awkward _this is wholly unexpected_ sound. Nevertheless, she reached for a hug, which Rose happily returned. "This is . . . weird, seeing you here."

"Yeah, I could say the same." Rose pulled away, hands skimming Tasha's elbows in the process.

"You two know each other?" Anton sounded like he was in more disbelief than anyone else.

"Rose is practically a daughter-in-law as far as I'm concerned," Tasha said, handing her purse off to the black-haired guardian behind her, and sat down. "She's good friends with Christian." Her eyes flicked to Dimitri across the table. "Lissa mentioned you were in Russia, but I didn't realize . . ."

"Small world," Dimitri replied, giving her a tight smile.

"Very small," Tasha agreed. She looked up at her guardian as he sat at the corner between her and Anton, her hand brushing the guy's arm. "This is Grigoriy Pavelevich. You already know Anton."

Introductions were made. Grigoriy, it turned out, was a close friend of Anton's older brother, and had been at St. Basil's a few years ahead of Anton and Dimitri, and, to Rose's further surprise, Dimitri and Tasha were friends through a cousin of hers, and she knew Grigoriy through one of his own cousins.

For such a huge country, everyone in Rose's world seemed pretty interconnected.

"So how on earth did you end up in Baia?" Tasha asked Rose, sliding her shot to Grigoriy without a word and ignoring the waitress's dirty look. "It's not the kind of place . . ."

"You can say it," Dimitri said to Tasha with a gentleness that hadn't been there initially, and Rose had to blink away her confusion. Her hand slid over his knee next to her and she squeezed briefly as if to ask _What's up with you?_

 _Nothing,_ his head shake said, wrapping his fingers around her wrist comfortingly and rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb.

 _You sure?_ her eyebrows asked, furrowed.

 _Not here_ , his eyes replied.

She nodded then, and turned back to Tasha, who'd barely swallowed back the inquisitive look on her face at the exchange in front of her.

"Baia isn't the kind of place someone like me would end up in," Rose said diplomatically, leaning back in her chair. "Yeah, I know. I'm there as a favor to Lissa."

"No chance you'll tell me about it?" Tasha asked, half-smiling with a tinge of mischievousness and Rose laughed, head tossed back. It'd been a while; she'd forgotten how much she enjoyed Tasha's company. They had enough similarities that it was easy to get along.

"If Christian hasn't told you, I certainly can't," Rose said, not breaking eye contact with Tasha as she turned her hand over so Dimitri, in a separate conversation with Anton and Grigoriy, could twine their fingers together. "I'm going back to Court in November, though."

"I'm sure you're ready to get home. I love Baia, but it can feel small after a while."

A large part of Rose would be perfectly content to stay for the rest of her life, and when she opened her mouth to say as much, she stopped, suddenly coming to the realization that she only felt that way whenever Dimitri was with her.

"I'm . . ." She drifted off, unconsciously squeezing Dimitri's hand in hers. "I'm not sure where 'home' is for me right now. I do miss my friends. It'll be nice to see my mother again and Jill's due date is coming up, which I'm excited about. I've been ready to spoil all my friends' kids for a while now."

Whatever Tasha had been ready to say, Rose's words derailed her for a moment. Tasha's eyes flicked down to Dimitri's knee, where his thumb was absent-mindedly rubbing the back of Rose's atop their clasped hands, and Tasha gave a smile tinged with something bittersweet when she looked back to Rose. "Spoiling everyone else's kids is great. You can load them up on sugar and hand them back when they get annoying."

Rose laughed — it sounded like something she'd say — and when it got Anton's attention, she and Tasha shared their conversation with the guys. Dimitri replied with an admittance of doing the same with Paul when he'd been younger if only to piss off Karolina and for the rest of the afternoon, conversation followed as steadily as the food and drinks that kept showing up.

* * *

The walk back to Anton's apartment included crossing one of Novosibirsk's bridges, and it was halfway over the bridge that Dimitri slowed to a stop and pulled Rose in close with an arm around her waist. In the distance were the other two bridges, as busy and bustling as the one behind them. He was silent for a few minutes, and she was content to simply lean into him, soaking in his presence.

"If I could bottle this moment for a some cold, winter day when you're not with me," he said quietly after a while, "I'd have dozens stashed away somewhere."

"Just dozens?" she teased, looking up at him. "Not hundreds or thousands?"

"Millions," he corrected, gazing down at her like he was terrified one of them might accidentally slip off the pedestrian walkway and into the river below. It was the look of someone who didn't want to let go. "I'd have millions and millions to get me through the days you're not with me."

"That's a lot of bottles."

"It is," he hummed. "But I live in Siberia. There's lots of space here."

She rocked up on her toes to kiss him. "You're stealing all my jokes, comrade."

* * *

Shortly after getting engaged, Karolina had sworn up and down that she wouldn't be the kind of bride who had a meltdown over every single thing.

"We all underestimate ourselves," Alex muttered under his breath one evening in the week leading up to the wedding. Rose had escaped to the backyard with him and Dimitri after dinner had dissolved into Karolina freaking out over deciding that no, she really did want tulips given to her by the guests at the ceremony and not lilacs like she'd been adamant about for months.

Alex looked to Rose and Dimitri, pointing at them while clutching his bottle of _kvas_. "Promise me that you will have an easy wedding."

Rose blanched. That was so far outside the realm of current thought about Dimitri that she—

"We promise to be as difficult for you as possible," Dimitri replied dryly over his own bottle. "Just you specifically, too, Sasha."

Alex swore at Dimitri then, and drained off the last of his _kvas_. He shook it and pushed himself up from one of the handful of rickety lawn chairs that served as the back porch to the house. "Mitya, _yeshche odin?_ "

Dimitri waved him off. " _Spasibo. Ya khorosho_."

Alex turned to Rose from the door and cocked an eyebrow.

" _Nyet, no spasibo_ ," Rose replied, wrinkling her nose. "We've been over this before, remember?"

"One day, Rose Hathaway," Alex said, waving his empty bottle at her. Her last name came out sounding like _Kha-tuh-vay_. "One day you'll learn to love the drink of this land."

The screen door swung shut behind him with a bang.

"You don't like _kvas_?" Dimitri asked.

Rose scrunched her face. Hadn't he noticed her turning it down literally every time it'd been offered to her since they'd met? "I'm not a fan of root beer, so slightly alcoholic root beer is like…what's the point? I'm not going to get drunk and I'd rather _eat_ rye bread than drink it, so it's just going to be an all-around, not-fun time for me, you know?"

"Oh, Roza," he laughed. He paused then, like he wanted to say something but thought better of it, and instead opted to bring the bottle back to his mouth and drain the dregs of it.

"What?" she prompted.

"What 'what'?"

"You looked like you were going to say more."

"No." He shook his head. Then, after a moment of staring at her: "I was thinking about how much I'll miss your weird observations on my country."

"They're not _that_ weird," she retorted playfully. She reached out with her foot to nudge his leg, and her smile was rueful. "But, yeah, I'm going to miss making them."

He seemed almost surprised. "You are? Based on how you talk about your friends back home lately, I thought…"

She tilted her head. "You thought what?"

"You seem…" He spoke slowly, as if choosing his words carefully. His gaze was off somewhere in the distance, past the houses and small backyards surrounding them. "You come off as very excited to go home. Not right now, but you talk like you're very aware of the fact that you're leaving in a few months."

If she was reading him correctly, he looked…sad. Like he was already missing her.

"I _am_ very aware of when I'm leaving," she said quietly, "But I'm not—"

Alex returned with another hinge-squeak- _bang_ of the metal door frame. He held out a _kvas_ to Dimitri and took his chair from a few minutes prior.

"I know you said you were fine, but one, you always say that when someone else is offering, even if you're not, and two, Kalya's in there second-guessing that maybe we should've had a church ceremony, so I'm about ready to go on a _zapoy_ if she doesn't fucking calm down before Friday."

"I thought she didn't want a trendy wedding?" Dimitri asked, eyebrows knit in confusion.

Alex rolled his eyes. " _Zhenshchiny, nye tak li_? No offense, Rose."

She shrugged. "Lissa's going through something similar right now. I think everyone doubts themselves right before they get married. Men just pretend like they don't because most of them are dumb."

"You joke _seychas_ ," Alex said, popping the top off his _kvas_. "But wait until you go through it yourself."

"I have no intention of ever getting married," Rose said without thinking and then, distinctly not looking at Dimitri when she realized how she sounded, she added, "Guardians don't get that luxury."

Alex merely grinned. "Come find me in ten years and we'll have this little talk again."

* * *

 **Rose:** I say duck those royal assholes amd jist do a rrusian wedding

 **Lissa:** …How drunk are you right now?

 **Rose:** fuck*

 **Rose:** Very

 **Rose:** I es told uit qwas "impolite" to b sobre 1 f thse thjinhs

 **Rose:** Autocorrt is saving alot of this fore rn

 **Rose:** for me*

 **Lissa:** How *long* have you been drinking?

 **Rose:** Since lik 3? No 2 since 2

 **Rose:** Ad is lije 9 niw

 **Lissa:** You're a mess, R.

 **Rose:** True but I'also drunmk

 **Rose:** See we al are:;

 **Rose:** [IMG_20150814_ ]

 **Lissa:** That kid in the front looks like he's fifteen.

 **Rose:** Paul is CUTALY SOXTREN

 **Lissa:** There is no way that was English.

 **Rose:** Павел — 16 лет.

 **Rose:** THAT wsant English

 **Lissa:** Interesting that you can type perfectly in Russian.

 **Rose:** I ddnit Diimtri diddddd

 **Lissa:** Dimitri?

[Seen at 21:18]

* * *

"I'm dead."

"No, you're—"

"Shh, comrade. Whisper. You gotta whisper or else my brain might explode."

"…I _am_ whispering, Rose."

"Fucking hell, you are? _Shit_."

Near silent laughter.

"Stop that, Dimitri, I'm mad at you."

"Me? What did I do?"

"You kept pouring shots and putting them in my hand."

"That was kind of my whole job yesterday. Remember my warning you the other night that this would happen because I was asked to be the _tamada_?"

"The fuck does that mean again?"

"Toastmaster, literally. Figuratively, Karo and Sasha asked me to keep everyone entertained during the party."

"Well, you failed, because I would've been fine on three or four shots, comrade."

"How much do you remember of the party?"

"I remember doing, like, way too many shots for any sane person to handle and everyone chanting 'corgi'."

" _Gorko_."

"Yeah, that. And then I think Karolina and Alex danced? And now I'm here. Oh, God, fucking shit, I blacked out. That hasn't happened since…a very long time. High school, probably. Shit, that's such a fucking amateur move."

"Their wedding is considered a great success because of that, actually."

"What? Really? I'm lying here, _embarrassed_ about all the shit I probably did and said, and—stop it, I can _feel_ you grinning, there's no need to laugh at my misery."

"The more people who can't remember the wedding, the better it will be perceived. If the couple can't remember, then they're all but guaranteed to have a good marriage."

"…How much do you people fucking _drink_ to come up with batshit crazy traditions like _that_?"

"I'm guessing this would probably be a bad time to mention that we continue celebrating today."

"You don't mean like—"

"We start with beer first, don't worry. I promise you won't be rocking a bottle of vodka like your child until this evening."

"Don't tell me there's photos of that shit."

"Even better."

"Fuck me." Beat. "Wait. Don't answer that. I can feel how naked I am underneath this blanket."

"If it's any consolation, I don't remember that part, either."

"That makes me want to puke just a little less. Do I really have to drink more today?"

"It would be rude not to."

She slowly rolled into him, and her response consisted of little more than a long, low groan.

"And before you ask, no, my liver isn't made of diamonds. I've just had a lot of practice."

"Or I need to put you on a transplant list because there's nothing left of it."

"That's a little dramatic. Statistics say I definitely have another ten to fifteen years before I'll need a new liver."

"And people think _I'm_ the wiseass in this relationship."

He pressed a kiss to her forehead, his lips lingering.

"You're my everything in this relationship," he finally whispered against her skin after a few quiet moments.

* * *

"I could live like this," Rose said, staring up at the night sky. She and Dimitri were lying atop the hood of his car, and she was far too drunk to remember how they ended up there. Something about Karolina and Alex's last night of their wedding party. The only part that she really cared about was that they were at the lake, the one where she'd first approached him one blistery cold December morning when he was in a mood and also perhaps, if she was being honest with herself, the day she began to fall a little bit in love with him.

"You could?" he asked, surprise in his voice.

"Yeah?" She turned her head to look at him. "Why the disbelief?"

He shrugged. "You don't seem like the kind of person who would be happy in a small town in the middle of nowhere."

"Mm," she hummed, mulling over his words for a few moments. Then: "Hey, Dimitri?"

"Yes?"

"Have you ever heard of the word 'projecting'?"

Silence rang between them until they both burst out laughing at the same time.

"I'll give you that one," he said after he calmed down, wiping a tear from his eye.

"You better. Minus the homesickness, I've done perfectly fine out here."

"I heard you lived on nothing but blini and water your first week here."

"Everyone has an adjustment period, comrade." She glanced at him, grinning. Slowly, it fell from her face as she took in his wistful expression. "You don't want to stay here, do you?"

He let out a long exhale before sitting up and taking a long swig of vodka from the bottle they'd been sharing earlier. "I think if things had worked out with Ivan's sister or anyone else - if I were married or had children by now - then I'd be alright with staying here."

"But you're not," Rose prompted, sitting up with him. She took the bottle from him and took a long drink for herself, wondering for the dozenth time that day alone why anyone drank the stuff straight.

"I'm not." His mouth was twisted, his gaze cast somewhere far off over the lake. She had some vague memory of Olena drunkenly slurring to her the previous night how happy she was that Dimitri had spent more of his summer mornings joining Rose on her runs than driving off to throw rocks and sulk at a body of water that couldn't talk back.

"If you could do anything with your life," she asked, needing to break the silence before it swallowed them both whole, "Right now, no boundaries, no limits, just do exactly what your heart desired, what would you do?"

"Move to the States and marry you."

His answer came so fast it nearly knocked her over. Slowly nodding to let her drunk-addled mind catch up, she asked, "What if that meant one of us had to leave the field?"

"I'd do it in a heartbeat." Earnest honesty was splayed across his face.

"Really?"

"Absolutely."

"I couldn't let you do that. Not for me."

"No, Roza, you don't understand. This job, this life? I don't want it. It's taken everything but my soul, and even that's a gamble sometimes. I don't have a home or a family of my own. The only consistency is the mind-numbing monotony of watching teenagers go about their daily lives." Despite the amount they'd been drinking that weekend, he struck Rose as surprisingly sober in that moment, like this was all what he'd been longing to say aloud for years. Shadows of the man she saw that morning in December seemed to darken his words. "I never asked to do this. I just did it because it was the only thing that could possibly get me out of Baia, and even that's failed."

"You haven't found purpose in your life," she summed up quietly.

He reached for the bottle and she let him take it. "You do that well," he said. "Saying in one sentence what it takes me dozens to articulate."

"It's a gift," she teased lightly.

His smile didn't quite reach his eyes. "But you're right - I haven't found purpose in my life."

"You've been drifting along for thirty years, and then you found me."

"I did."

"As romantic as that sounds, Dimitri," she said, reaching up to tuck a stray lock of hair behind his ear, "I can't be all of that for you. That's not healthy."

"You're not," he replied, turning his head into her wrist, vodka-wet lips pressing a kiss to the inside of her arm. "But you've given me something worth reaching for, which is more than enough. That's why I'd be fine with the leaving the field if it meant we could be together."

The vodka made the wheels in her head start turning with a plan. "What would you do instead?"

"Honestly? In a perfect world with no limits?"

"Yeah."

"This is going to sound crazy to you, but I'd relocate to the American Court and get involved with politics."

She shook her head. There was no way this conversation would ever happen sober. "It's not _that_ crazy an idea."

"You're looking at me like I'm crazy."

"Well…why? I could see you doing that, but I can't quite figure out your reasoning for it."

"You've seen my hometown. We share an Alchemist with every other dhampir population in a seven-hour drive from here. We might as well be governing on our own. There's only a specific type of Moroi man who even remembers we exist, and the Guardian Council only ever really speaks up for the dhampirs in their system. We have no representation in legislative matters, yet every law and decree passed by the Moroi Council unanimously affects us, whether it's good for us or not."

"Alright."

"So, what I would do — again, in a perfect world — is I would start lobbying for allowing the Guardian Council to weigh in on dhampir-related matters because I know some of them come from communes like this one and could provide that kind of insight. Once that started happening, I'd lobby for one or two dhampir seats on the Moroi Council so we could have a direct impact on legislation. I'd also probably get involved with the offensive magic program you and your friends have created."

She stared at him for what felt like forever but was likely only a few seconds. "I'm cutting you off, comrade," she laughed. "You're far too drunk as it is."

"You asked what I would do in a perfect world and I answered."

"Okay." She rolled her eyes. "And what would you do in this imperfect world we live in?"

" _Nye znayu_." He shrugged a shoulder. "Probably teach at one of the academies in the States."

"Yeah, I'm taking this," she said, plucking the bottle from his hands. "You're absolutely sloshed."

"No, I'm not."

"Mhm. Keeping telling yourself that," she said, hopping off the car and working on draining what was left in it.

"Give it back. That's my vodka."

"Pretty sure your sister bought it, actually."

" _Roza_."

"You're whining like you're five." She twirled around, waving the bottle up in the air at him as she started backing up, forgetting the lake was right behind her. There was maybe a shot's worth of vodka left. "If you want it, come get it," she teased.

He was off the car in a flash, chasing her screaming laughter until he caught her, dragging her down into the waist-deep water. She surfaced first, holding up the now empty bottle with a pout.

"Look at what you made me do!"

"You're the one who ran into the water first."

"Yeah, well." At a loss for any kind of witty comeback, she tossed the bottle somewhere behind her and surged into him, legs wrapping around his torso. "Shut up and kiss me, comrade."

"Happily," he replied with a grin, pulling her down into the water with him.


	10. Chapter Ten

I'M BAAAAAAAAACK! :)

* * *

 **Rose:** I need quick and dirty tips on how to deal with three-day hangovers

 **Rose:** Like hangovers from drinking for three days straight

 **Adrian:** Damn little dhampir, that's impressive

 **Adrian:** But

 **Adrian:** Bloody Marys for dayyyyysssssss

 **Rose:** I'm serious

 **Adrian:** Did anyone warn you that Russian weddings will fuck you up? Because they do. I've been to a couple. Wild to attend boring to talk about. Nobody remembers anything

 **Rose:** Adrian.

 **Adrian:** Hold thy horses Hathaway I'm pulling up my old cocktail recipe to send to you

 **Rose:** I'm serious about no more booze

 **Adrian:** Not a drop of alcohol in this cocktail, I promise

 **Rose:** Oh god

 **Rose:** Why does this look like it might make me puke?

 **Adrian:** Because it will. Make it, drink it, puke it, and then hydrate until you've got water dripping from your eyeballs

 **Adrian:** I acknowledge that's just a really metaphorical way of describing crying

 **Rose:** Is this going to be one of those things where I hate you for it during but later I'll realize you kind of had a clue?

 **Adrian:** Most likely

 **Rose:** I hate you

 **Adrian:** That's just the vodka vapors talking

 **Rose:** Vodka vapors aren't a thing

 **Adrian:** Whatever you say little dhampir. Just let me know how you're doing tomorrow ok?

 **Rose:** Will do

* * *

A week after Karolina and Alex were married, Rose woke up to Dimitri packing.

"What—" Rubbing her eyes, she sat up. "You're not leaving for another week."

He shot her a grin and pulled a small packet of paper out of his back pocket. "No, but we are. Today. Here."

She took the papers from him and unfolded them. Printouts of flight and hotel reservations stared back at her. Unable to focus on the words, she arched an eyebrow and a half. "Where'd you find a printer in Baia?"

"We have a library."

" _Where?_ "

He shook his head. "Just read it."

The airport codes escaped her, but she could read everything else — times, terminals, seat numbers — just well enough to understand what was up his sleeve. "This is a…"

"A holiday, yes." He looked like he was doing his very best to fight a grin.

She frowned. "But…why? I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the idea of going on vacation, but I'm just a little…" She trailed off, reading the reservations over again.

"I'm going back to work on the thirtieth and by the time I'm home on my next break…" She glanced up in time to watch him sober, his mouth ticking into a frown. "There's not a lot of privacy in this house, and not only do I want time alone with you during our last week together, we do need to discuss the fact that it _is_ our last week together. While you're in Russia, I mean."

Lips pressed together, she nodded. "Yeah, I understand that."

"I knew you would." Dimitri didn't stop himself from grinning this time, and he took the papers back from Rose before resuming packing. "Get your things together because, my Roza," he said as she stood, and he wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her close, "We have a plane to catch."

* * *

 _Roza Khatavay dobavlyena novaya fotografiya v VK_ :  
Can't believe I had to travel all the way to Moscow for Starbucks)))) #toofarforcoffee #notquitehomebutcloseenough #doyouthinkDregretsthistripalready #probablynot

 **Viktoriya Belikova** how much sugar did you put in that

 **Roza Khatavay** Not enough tbh

 **Sonechka Belikova** Have a safe flight))) Sorry I wasn't home this morning

 **Mitya Belikov** spasibo sonya)) One of us will call you when we land!

 **Roza Khatavay** Yeah…. Emphasis on one because it won't be D lololol

* * *

 **Rose:** How willing are you to be an accomplice in my rule-breaking?

 **Sydney:** Depends on the rule(s) involved.

 **Rose:** It's about Dimitri

 **Sydney:** I'm fairly certain I've got impunity on most dhampir issues, though nobody's ever made that quite clear to me.

 **Sydney:** In any event, I'm sure whatever you have to share is worth the eventual headache that will definitely result.

 **Rose:** Hey now

 **Sydney:** It's you. There's always a headache waiting for the rest of us.

 **Rose:** I don't know if I should be flattered you know me so well or insulted by everything you just said

 **Sydney:** You're diverting. What's up?

 **Rose:** Yeah…so…we're on…vacation.

 **Sydney:** YOU'RE WHAT

 **Rose:** Uh huh

 **Sydney:** WHERE

 **Rose:** Sochi

 **Rose:** Well, not Sochi proper

 **Rose:** Some mountain with my name in it, I think

 **Rose:** He's a cheeky little shit

 **Sydney:** Rosa Khutor?

 **Rose:** You know it?

 **Sydney:** Only from photos. It's GORGEOUS from what I've heard.

 **Rose:** IT IS

 **Sydney:** All I ever heard people talking about during my SPB internship was how they wanted to go there in the summer on a dream vacation.

 **Sydney:** Color me impressed. That's not cheap.

 **Rose:** I've tried to avoid googling, but I've already picked up on that

 **Sydney:** So you two are…what? Exactly?

 **Rose:** Idk

 **Rose:** That's kind of the whole point of this trip

 **Rose:** To talk about our relationship and the future and all that

 **Rose:** But mostly all we've done so far is eat, sleep and fuck

 **Sydney:** I'm sure he's just waiting for the right moment. He struck me as the kind of guy who needs to be the in the right kind of headspace to talk about a topic like that.

 **Rose:** True

 **Sydney:** I have to run. Declan's waking up. Send me pictures, though, since I know you can't post them anywhere ;)

 **Rose:** I will!

* * *

The resort Dimitri had whisked them away to was situated just outside Sochi, up in the northern tip of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, and the balcony attached to their room overlooked Rosa Khutor itself. On their final night, Rose found herself sitting on the railing, lost in thought, a foot hooked around one of the wooden beams as she soaked in the shadows that the setting sun cast across the mountains around their resort.

"What's the saying in English?" Dimitri asked from seemingly out of nowhere, gently startling her out of her daze. "Live life on the edge?"

"Living life on the edge," Rose softly corrected, unhooking her foot when he moved behind her and wrapped his arms around her. She sighed as she leaned back into him, his chest still warm from the shower he'd just taken.

"Whatever it is, you sure seem to like it."

"Why do you say that?"

"The only things keeping you from falling off this seven story balcony are my arms and your own balance."

"Then don't let me go," she murmured, twisting as much as she could to look up at him.

"Never," he whispered, ducking his head to kiss her.

"We should have that conversation," she said when they surfaced for air a few minutes later.

"Maybe with you not sitting on the railing?"

She looked down at the trees that would definitely not help her if she fell. "Alright, yeah, you've got a point."

Eventually they settled on the balcony floor, pressed into a corner with Rose curled up against Dimitri's side and the two of them huddled under the duvet from the bed inside. They sat in silence, simply watching the sunset, as she traced the veins along his hands and wrist until she couldn't take it anymore.

"Something's been bothering you all week," she murmured, pressing her lips to the hem of his shirt sleeve.

"This week has been… bittersweet." He half-smiled ruefully. "Why did you wait until now to say anything?"

She shrugged. "I figured I'd let you bring it up when you were ready. You might get lost in your head a lot, but I know you always come to me once you make sense of your thoughts and want to talk."

Silence fell again for another handful of heartbeats.

"So…" Rose prodded, lightly digging her knuckle into his side. "Talk to me."

"How many…" Dimitri sighed. "How many of your friends back home have you talked to about us?" When Rose began to protest, he moved a hand to her knee and squeezed. "I don't mean that in a bad way. There's nothing wrong with it. I just want you to stop and think about it so that we're on the same page."

Fixing her gaze on the mountains stretched out around them, Rose let out a breath as she did a mental count. "Sydney and Adrian, for sure. Eddie probably figured out something had happened. Jill—" She stopped herself. Dimitri still didn't know about her pregnancy scare, so there'd be no reason for Jill to know other than—

"Jill?" Dimitri prompted, his brow scrunched together.

"Knows whatever Eddie knows," Rose settled on. Knowing Jill and Eddie's relationship, she'd likely told him about Rose's panicked midnight phone call months prior, but Rose trusted Eddie enough to keep it to himself. "I don't think anybody else knows anything outright. Lissa caught wind that something was going on between us, but she thinks it ended back in January when you returned to the school."

"So you've been lying. To the Queen," Dimitri clarified, a startled yet concerned expression punctuating his features.

Rose looked away, guilt and uncertainty eating at her. The closer November got, the more she had no idea how she was going to look Lissa in the eye and keep her story afloat. At least right now, there was a continent between them.

"That's a permanent removal from the field _at best_ ," Dimitri continued.

"And?" She shot back, not able to look at him. "Would that really be such a bad thing?"

"Aside from the fact that we'll be on opposite sides of the planet," he replied dryly, "is that really what you want? To be strapped to a desk until you're old enough to retire?"

It wasn't, and she was sure it was obvious on her face. "I'll talk to her when I get back, then."

He shifted, tightening his arms around her. "It's not—"

"Lies never work out for anyone in the end," Rose interrupted. She squeezed his hand and he nodded in response, pressing his lips to her hair.

"Anyone else?"

"Tasha knows, but you knew that already."

"You know Christian better than I do. Would she tell him?"

Rose shrugged a shoulder. "No idea. She could go either way. But if she did, he'd come to me first. He's good at recognizing when I get myself into shit and need a way to tell Lissa." She groaned. "God, there's going to be hell to pay when she finds out."

"What do you mean?"

Taking a deep breath, Rose tilted her head back to look up at Dimitri. "You don't know what the monarch tests were, do you?"

"No."

"The third one was a simple question and answer. Every candidate was asked what they must have in order to rule, and Lissa answered that she had nothing because she would give everything to her people. All of her guardians? We're held to the same standard."

Realization dawned across Dimitri's face. All of a sudden, Rose's throat started closing up. She hastily brushed at her eyes with her shirt sleeve, annoyed that she was tearing up. Had living an ordinary, normal life with a family and a boyfriend in a small town for nearly a year been a welcome respite? Absolutely. She'd relished in feeling like she had friends and sisters and a social life.

But November was rapidly approaching and there was nothing Rose could do to slow down the clock, no matter how much she wanted to.

"What if I left the field?" Dimitri asked quietly.

Their night at the lake the other week flashed back to her. "I've already told you I wouldn't let you do that for me."

He looked bewildered. "You remember that?"

"Of course I do." She levelled him a look. "I remember every minute of my life that I've spent with you."

He held his smile long enough that it morphed from loving to plaintive. "So where do we go from here?"

Biting back a light-heated quip, Rose sucked her lower lip into her mouth, worrying it between her teeth as she thought. "We go back to work and keep doing the long distance thing. When I get back to Court, I'll get a feel for what would happen if knowledge of us got out and became public."

"And if we become public before we're ready?"

"Shh," she hushed, knocking on the wooden balcony floor. "Don't jinx it."

"I'm serious, Rose."

"Then we cross that bridge when we come to it."

"What on earth does _that_ mean?"

She smiled and kissed under his chin, along his jawline. "It means we won't worry about it unless it happens."

"That's terrible planning."

"I'm a terrible planner."

"And what about long term? We can't live like this forever."

Her heart soared into her throat. In her mind, life beyond going home in November was murky. "You're there," she said. "I don't know how, but I'll figure it out. What about you?"

He let out a long breath. "Admittedly, I have fewer puzzle pieces to work out, but… I want you. Now and forever, no matter what."

She shifted onto his lap, taking his hands in hers. "Promise me something?"

"Anything."

"That's dangerous," she interjected, eyeing him.

"Almost anything, then," he conceded.

"When this relationship comes to light—when _we_ come to light, that is—"

"Yes?"

"Promise me we'll make it. Promise me that no matter what, we'll come out on the other side."

He gave a soft laugh. "Roza, I love you."

She felt the disappointment flash across her face.

"But I promise to always stand by your side," he added.

"Good, because—" She sucked in a breath, feeling like it was then or never.

"Because?"

"BecauseIloveyoutoo," she rushed out, eyes squeezed shut. Her chest felt like it'd expanded three sizes before collapsing in on her. "And I don't want to lose you," she added, this time more slowly as she carefully opened her eyes. Adoration and happiness filled his face, and she melted under his heated gaze. Half of her wanted to sprint away from him; the other half revelled in how alive she felt in that moment.

"I never want to lose you, either," he murmured before pulling her in for a kiss that sucked all the breath out of her lungs. Her hands shook as she linked her fingers behind his neck.

And somehow, Rose knew waiting until that moment was the right thing to do. Up until then, she hadn't be certain of her feelings, but she could feel it in her bones that this was love.

"No matter what, Roza," he said when they pulled apart. "I'm in your corner." He pecked her on the lips, brief and sweet. "And as much as I'd love to sit here all night and discuss the future with you, we have dinner reservations in twenty minutes."

"Your sense of timing is incredible," she said, standing up and feeling out of body at the fact that they were suddenly shelving such an important conversation. _Get used to this_ , a little voice nagged at her in the back of her head.

"Some of us actually pay attention to the clock," Dimitri teased, grabbing the bedding they'd dragged outside and leading her into the room.

"Oh shut up," she said, swallowing back tears. "At least you can always count on me to be late."

He dropped the bedding and turned around, pulling her in with one arm and cradling her face. "I can count on you for a lot more than that, Roza," he intoned quietly, kissing her deeply enough that she forgot about dinner for hours.

* * *

 **Field Report Twenty-Six (26)**

R. Hathaway

October 21

[Note: Previous name changes have been kept.]

[. . .]

As for my own emotions, they're a mixed bag. On the one hand, I will miss everyone here. It's impossible to not reach out and connect to the people who've housed and fed you in exchange for getting to know them for the past 13 months. Everyone can sense that my departure is rapidly approaching — even the old woman, Evgeniya, has expressed her sadness to me, though never outright or direct the way the rest of the family communicates. On the other hand, I have a niece and a goddaughter on the way back home, as well as all the friends and makeshift family who've supported me through this whole assignment. Nonetheless, my feelings are irrelevant to this work and are thus no more than merely a footnote to this project.

[. . .]

A final report will be written and submitted upon my return to the Royal Court in roughly two weeks.

* * *

Rose's phone buzzed only once when she turned her phone back on in Philadelphia.

 **Viktoria:** Dimitri said you would be on the ground by now, so welcome home! Miss you already!

Her initial connecting flight from the airport to Court had been cancelled due to an impending snowstorm. Instead, Lissa had sent an escort to drive her back in a 4-wheel SUV — two guardians, one of whom she vaguely knew and was assigned to a Voda lord who lived at Court while the other looked fresh out of an academy.

"What, do we give driving lessons now?" Rose quipped, the first words she'd spoken to anyone since boarding the plane in Moscow.

The older guardian, Ryan, laughed. "Yeah, we do for the greens assigned to Court."

"Really?" She gave a hollow laugh of disbelief. "Since when?"

"It's new this year." Ryan rolled his eyes. "Driver's ed got cut to make room for more training, so the Queen dumped it on the vets at Court."

"Damn." She let out a low whistle. "I hope I don't get saddled with that."

Ryan laughed again. "You won't. Queen's guards are exempt."

Her heart soared. Lissa had promised she'd work on getting Rose added to her guardian corps while she was in Russia. Rose hadn't heard anything lately, but Ryan's words made it seem like Lissa had actually made some progress on that.

Despite the increasing snowfall and winds, Court was the same as it always was: hidden yet imposing, large yet confining. For a moment, Rose wondered why she expected anything else. She'd only been gone a year; somehow, though, it felt like a decade, and she a completely different person. Rose a year prior didn't have a boyfriend or a sense of beginning to have her own life. Driving through Court, however, Rose could feel all her old burdens she'd ignored in Russia begin to dig themselves up and resettle on her shoulders.

Christian of all people was waiting for her outside the guardians' parking garage, and Rose flung herself into his arms with more enthusiasm than she'd anticipated.

"Russia must've been terrible for me to get a greeting like this," Christian joked as she pulled away, swallowing the hurt that came from someone else assuming she was excited to be back. In truth, her chest had started aching when she'd had to physically pry a sobbing Alexei off her legs and hand him over to an equally teary Karolina barely 48 hours prior, and it hadn't stopped since then.

"Shut up, it wasn't all awful," she said, swatting him lightly on the arm. She held out her smaller duffel bag, one of many parting gifts from the Belikovs, and Christian took it as they began to make their way towards royal housing.

"How was the flight?"

She shrugged. "Uneventful. Lissa said my room was moved?" Rose asked, hoping to keep the conversation off her as much as possible. It bothered her how much her thoughts already kept drifting back to Dimitri and his family; the less she talked about Russia, the fewer chances she'd have to slip.

 _And what about long term? We can't live like this forever._

Dimitri's words from a couple months ago hit her out of nowhere, and she finally understood what he meant. She suddenly regretted treating that particular concern of his so flippantly. Only five minutes with Christian and Rose was ready to take a vow of silence if it meant eliminating any chance of slipping up about the boyfriend she was harboring thousands of miles away.

"Yeah," Christian said, seemingly unaware of the battle going on inside her head and heart. "She didn't know how you wanted things, so she just left everything in boxes. Let you have a fresh start and all that."

"Awesome," Rose said, her words devoid of any playfulness they would've held in any other situation. "More unpacking."

Christian cut her a sidelong look. "Are you okay? You seem different."

Fuck.

"Yeah, just jetlagged. I don't even know what time it is."

"It is—" Christian pulled his phone out of his back pocket. "Quarter to seven. Lissa wants to have breakfast with you in a half hour, assuming you're still awake."

"I'll never readjust to nocturnal hours if I go to bed now," Rose grumbled, holding the door to royal housing open for Christian.

"Are you sure you're okay, though?" he asked once they were in the elevator. "This is a safe space, you know you can always—"

"Look, Christian, I appreciate the concern, but you need to remember I've been backpacking in the Siberian tundra for the last thirteen months and you've been in my very tired presence for all of fifteen minutes. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm in desperate need of a shower, and I'm only going to be able to fix two of those things in the near future." She sighed, letting her head hit the back wall of the elevator with an audible thud. "I'm sorry, I'm just exhausted beyond belief."

Christian nodded, letting her apology hang in the air until the elevator hit her floor. "They must have pretty nice tents out there if you were backpacking."

"What do you mean?" Rose asked, following him down the hallway.

"I could've sworn you always Skyped Lissa from a bed."

Rose rolled her eyes, appreciative that he wasn't pressing about her outburst the way Lissa or Sydney would have. "Might as well have been backpacking. When I left, there was three feet of snow on the ground, and nobody outside of a city has central heating."

Christian mocked an outraged gasp. "Monsters. How on Earth did you survive such conditions?"

"No idea. This could be hell for all I know."

"Hey now, Court's at least purgatory. It's not all that bad."

"It's definitely not heaven," she said as they slowed in front of what she presumed to be her door. He handed her a key tied to a slip of emerald green ribbon, and she gave him a grateful smile. "Thanks for meeting me."

He shrugged. "No worries. I would've been up anyway. Lissa's not sleeping well these days, so this was a chance for me to escape that."

She unlocked the door and let it swing open as she hugged him again.

"Seriously, Rose, are you okay? I think this is the most affectionate you've ever been, and we went through some shit together in the past."

"Yeah," she said lamely, feeling like she'd be falling back on this particular excuse a lot in the upcoming days. "Just tired. Missed everyone a lot. All that fun stuff." She gave him a smile. "I'm good from here. Going to take a shower since Her Royal Highness wants to have a breakfast date the minute I get back." She playfully rolled her eyes. "And I certainly don't need your help for that."

"No you don't," Christian replied, grinning. "I'll see you later."

"See ya," she said, waiting until he was at the end of the hall to shut her door. She sagged against the thin wood and, stupidly feeling like the world was ending, broke down into tears.

* * *

 **Wow. Seven months. Seasonal depression is a bitch. To those of you who have discovered or reread this fic while I was knocked on my ass and left a review — thank you. It meant a lot. They helped keep me on track and reminded me why I was writing this in the first place. I can't promise an exact date on the next chapter, but rest assured, my beta will kill me if I let this fic go on hiatus again.**

 **Special thanks to those who've helped me through life from Thanksgiving until now, including gigi256, sagemb (my beta), and ohorpheuss. There'd be no chapter with you guys. Thank you.**


	11. Chapter Eleven

I'm alive! I'm so sorry I disappeared yet again; 2018 has been something of a whirlwind for me. In addition, this is a chapter that has plagued me for... over two years now, if I'm counting correctly, so in all honesty, part of me was avoiding it. But it's done! And it's here! No promises on the next chapter, just that I hope to have it up by December. If you're still following this, thank you so much for reading and sticking around. It means the world to me. -Em x

* * *

 _I should stand up._

A groan died in Rose's chest before it even fully formed. She felt too drained to make a noise, let alone get up from the floor and face her new reality. Or was it her old reality?

 _You're stalling. Stand up._

She counted to five in her head and then let out a long sigh. Her nose was running, her face felt flush, and she could feel the tear tracks on her cheeks freezing in the unheated apartment. Joints aching like she'd aged a thousand years, Rose gingerly stood up and took stock of her surroundings, wiping the wetness off her cheeks with a slightly shaky hand.

A faint hint of lemon and musk in the air, along with the kitchen counter gleaming in the setting sun, suggested someone — probably Lissa — had sent someone in for a full cleaning. Everything was where she'd left it, from the framed photos of her friends scattered around her TV stand to her favorite blanket crumpled up in a ball at the end of the couch. Only thinking about how Olena would've never stood for a blanket to at least not be folded, Rose crossed the room to the couch, picked it up, and buried her face in the purple plush as more tears began to fall.

 _Stop crying, Rose. It was just a work assignment. Get over yourself._

A knock at the door pulled her out of her thoughts.

"Her Majesty is expecting you for breakfast in the Dining Room at seven-thirty," the messenger said when Rose opened the door.

"Formal or informal?" she asked, secretly praying for the latter.

"Informal. There isn't a dress code."

Rose reached into her pocket and pulled out a five dollar bill, mentally calculating how much time she had for a shower. "Thanks," she said and then passed the money along before shutting and locking her door.

* * *

The informal royal dining room wasn't nearly as ostentatious as the formal dining room, but Rose hadn't quite remembered how the tall ceiling, giant crystal chandelier, and professionally-set table could make her feel underdressed in a sweater and pair of dark jeans. A pair of Moroi dining servants stood on either side of the double wooden doors on the other end of the room eyed her warily as she wandered in, doing her best to ignore them. After a year of dancing around half a dozen people in a tiny, constantly overheated kitchen just to make tea and toast for herself, the idea of having people wait on her in a room as big as her apartment was downright unsettling.

Lissa arrived moments later, her pack of guardians in tow, and Rose didn't need the bond to feel the utter excitement and happiness rolling off her best friend as they launched into each other's arms, clinging for dear life.

"I've missed you so much," Lissa breathed into her ear, and Rose tightened her grip in response. They pulled apart a few moments later and took their seats, Lissa at the head of the table and Rose to her right, and Lissa's grin was still digging into her cheeks. "You look tired."

As if on cue, Rose yawned. "I _feel_ tired. I've been travelling for the last three days straight. I have no idea what day it is."

"It's Saturday. Thank you," Lissa said as one of the servants poured the both of them coffee. She touched the woman on the arm with a gentle smile. "Can I bother you for a double espresso?"

"It's not a bother at all, Your Majesty," the woman said. She gave Lissa a small nod and disappeared through a side door.

"Then scratch that," Rose said, reaching for the sugar bowl and dumping five spoonfuls in. "It's been four days since I left Baia on Tuesday."

Lissa was watching her; Rose went about fixing her coffee as if she didn't notice.

"This is going to sound obvious to you," Lissa said as the other servant made her coffee for her, "And I can't quite put my finger on how but… there's something different about you."

"I just spent a year living on porridge for breakfast," Rose said dryly. "I couldn't even eat eggs for an entire winter. It was terrible."

"No it wasn't. Not for you."

Rose eyed Lissa as she took a tentative sip. "You've gotten good at that."

"What?"

"Reading people without their auras."

Lissa tossed her head back and laughed. The woman returned with a tiny coffee mug on a tiny saucer and set it down in front of Lissa as the other servant began bringing silver trays of food to the table. A spread big enough for an army began to appear before Rose's eyes — thick pancakes and slices of French toast, scrambled and fried eggs, sausage links stacked atop a bed of bacon, a wide selection of fruit that would've made Zoya launch into a recitation of her English color words, and a mound of toast and muffins neatly arranged in a small tower — and her mouth watered at the sight of foods she'd only had makeshift variations of in Russia.

"I've certainly been working on it," Lissa admitted, tipping back her espresso. Her eyes fluttered shut in pleasure as her mouth screwed up in distaste.

"I don't know how you drink that stuff," Rose said as she piled her plate full of food. "Aren't you supposed to be off the caffeine right now anyway?"

Lissa waved her off. "My doctor cleared me for it. Besides, I barely slept last night, and I'm gonna need it today."

"Full schedule?" Rose asked around a mouthful of bacon.

"Sundays are my only day off," Lissa replied. She gave a nod to the woman as she set down an assembled plate in front of Lissa. Even her toast was buttered, Rose noted. "I've rearranged my Saturdays so that it's only a half day, but there's a reception tonight for—"

The side door the servants were using banged open as the messenger Rose saw earlier ran in, hastily bowing to Lissa and completely ignoring Rose.

"What's wrong, Jacob?" Lissa asked, her attention on full alert.

"It's your sister, Your Majesty," he said, agitated.

Lissa was already rising out of her seat. Rose's fork hovered over a cut piece of pancake. "Is everything okay? Is the baby okay? Is she okay?"

Jacob shook his head. "She's fine. For right now. She's in labor. One of her nurses paged us to let you know. She and Guardian Castile are on the private floor of the clinic, per their plan you signed off on last week."

"She's early," Lissa said, fear tinging her voice.

"Only by two weeks," interjected Rose, deciding that she'd rather stand than be left out of the conversation. The endless conversations she'd sat through about various pregnancies in Baia were suddenly useful, and she thanked her lucky stars for having cared enough to occasionally pay attention. "Even for a Moroi, that's still full term. They'll be fine."

Lissa's face said she wasn't convinced.

"C'mon," Rose said, grabbing her peacoat and slinging it on. "Jacob, right?"

He nodded.

"Can you have someone pack up Lissa's plate and send it over to the clinic?"

Lissa shook her head. "I'm not hungry."

"You might not be, but Baby Dragomir is," Rose said. When Lissa opened her mouth, Rose wrapped an arm around Lissa and started leading her out of the dining room. "Don't fight me on that. If I can't make you eat, Christian will."

"Fine." Lissa stopped and turned around, barking out orders to Jacob and the two servants. "Send two takeaways for Guardian Hathaway and myself. I also want a tray sent over for the others since I have people meeting us there. Jacob, make sure Christian's awake and inform him of the situation." She pulled her phone out of her dress pocket and handed it to Jacob. "Get this to Mia. Have her cancel the rest of my day and inform my Monday appointments that my availability is now tentative. Before you three go—" Lissa stopped and let the gravity of the situation weigh over the room for a moment. "—Not a word about this to anyone. If this leaks, I will know it came from one of you. I want to make sure my sister and her baby are stable before we announce anything."

"Understood, Your Majesty," the three chorused together, bowing slightly.

"Good. _Go_."

* * *

A nurse was waiting for them at the private back entrance to the clinic when they arrived, and she nodded when Lissa sprang out of the SUV and made a beeline for her.

"Your Majesty," the nurse began, swiping her badge against the door lock and allowing Lissa to sweep in, Rose and the guardians closely following behind. "Princess Dragomir was admitted a half hour ago. She's currently stable and the baby is fine as far as we can tell. Her contractions are…"

Rose's attention faded away as memories of her various visits to the dhampir wing came flooding back. She'd been as much of a regular there as she'd been to the clinic at St. Vladimir's. The nurse led them to the private elevator, and the group of them squeezed in tight, Lissa in the center. Rose was barely paying attention to anything — her thoughts jumped from her panicked phone call to Jill about her own pregnancy scare to Dimitri sitting by her side in the hospital in Omsk. She could still see the worry in his brow and feel the warmth of his hands carefully brushing her hair for her shortly before she'd been discharged. Would he be nearly as worried as Lissa was now for Jill, or more? Would he even have been excited the way Rose suddenly found herself wishing he had been?

The elevator dinged open, shaking Rose back into the present, and she let Lissa rush down the hallway to meet Adrian and Eddie outside what Rose guessed was Jill's room. Lissa's guardians flanked themselves around the corridor, though Rose suspected Jill was the only patient on the floor at the moment, perhaps for secrecy and definitely for security. While the Moroi world was excited for a new royal baby, Lissa's political dissidents had been vocal in their unhappiness with Jill's legitimacy throughout the duration of her pregnancy. Only now was it hitting Rose the lengths Jill and Lissa likely had to go through to ensure the safe arrival of the baby.

Sydney was leaning against the wall opposite Jill's door as Adrian and Eddie gave Lissa a more intimate update on Jill's status, and her face lit up when she saw Rose approaching.

"How are you?" Sydney genuinely asked with a side glance at Lissa after they exchanged a hug.

Rose followed her friend's gaze. "I'm doing alright. Mostly just exhausted at the moment. You?"

Sydney nodded, picking her giant travel mug up off the floor and showing it off. "Not nearly as exhausted as you probably are, but almost."

Rose rolled her eyes and they shared a small laugh between them.

"How was your trip?" Sydney asked, balancing the mug atop the handrail on the wall.

"Long. Tiring. I left Tuesday and now it's Saturday and I couldn't tell you what happened in between other than I never want to see an airport or train station for a long time."

Grinning, Sydney asked, "So I take it you're not visiting first?"

Rose glanced over her shoulder. Lissa was still deep in conversation. "I was just there for over a year. He can return the favor if he wants to see me again."

Sydney snorted. "I've missed you, Rose."

"You saw me back in March. We Skyped literally two weeks ago."

"Not the same," Sydney replied, shaking her head. "Not the same at all."

A flurry of voices behind Rose caught her attention; Christian and Mia had finally arrived, and in her peripherals, she saw Adrian take the opportunity to slink across the hall and join her and Sydney.

"Little dhampir," he greeted, and her heart warmed at hearing his voice in person again. She pulled him in for a hug as Sydney located her phone and began tapping away. "You holding up? I know this has been a rough week for you."

Rose slowly nodded.

"We'll talk later, once this scene settles down," Adrian said, "But as long as you're okay right now…"

"I cried earlier, so I'm good for the moment," Rose replied, trying and failing to make light of her situation. "I think it'd be tougher if we hadn't said good-bye a couple months ago."

"I'm sure it made the transition easier," Adrian said.

"Yes and no." Rose's mouth twisted as she recalled the way Katya followed her around like a shadow during her final week in Baia. "There was still everyone else to say goodbye to. Alex drove me to the airport because he figured I'd cry the least over seeing him last."

Sydney pocketed her phone. "Paul's graduating next summer, right?"

"Yep." Rose forced herself to smile. "So I'll get to see him then. But I don't know about the others, and…" She paused, unsure of how to discreetly refer to Dimitri now that Eddie had dipped back into Jill's room and Lissa and Christian had taken seats halfway down the hall, silence between them as she rested her head on his shoulder. Mia was further away, chatting rapidly into Lissa's phone and pacing back and forth the width of the hallway.

"No concrete plans?" Adrian asked, his voice still low.

"Yeah. We've only talked in general about a future visit, but nothing specific."

"You guys will figure it out," Sydney said gently. "I've seen you two together. Nothing will keep you apart forever."

Rose let out a slow breath, her shoulders sagging. "I hope so." She stared off into the distance, debating whether she should text him before realizing she'd left her phone in the dining room. Pulling herself back to Adrian and Sydney in front of her, she asked, "How's Jill doing?

The pair exchanged a tired look. "She went into labor late last night," Adrian explained. "Eddie called me in a panic, as if I know anything about childbirth."

"They weren't prepared at all," Sydney elaborated, "So Adrian woke me up, we called Daniella to come over and watch Declan until we get back, and Adrian helped Eddie pack a bag while I got Jill over here."

"That's her fourth refill since we got here," Adrian added with a smitten look in Sydney's direction. She rolled her eyes and reached for her travel mug to take a long sip.

"Her contractions were three minutes apart when we got here and they haven't really sped up," Sydney said, hugging the travel mug close to her chest. "We decided to wait until Lissa was awake to let her know."

Rose's eyes narrowed. "We were told Jill got here a half hour ago."

Adrian winked. "Small white lie. She'll be pissed, but we'll explain to Lissa once the baby's here."

Guilt bit off a piece of Rose's chest and she steamrolled right over the emotion with an amused chuckle. "Amazing how someone can be in charge of our world and still not know everything."

"Makes you wonder what we don't know, doesn't it?" Sydney mused, her gaze focused on Lissa and Christian.

"Yeah." Rose looked back over her shoulder at her best friend and her fiance, and she felt Adrian shift next to her, presumably to do the same. "Really makes you wonder."

* * *

Thirteen long, arduous hours later, Rose was perched on the edge of Jill's hospital bed, squeezing her friend's hand as Jill grimaced through another long, painful cramp.

"Ugh," she groaned, sinking back into her bed when it passed. "Nobody told me this shit keeps going _after_ you've given birth."

"The hard part's over," Eddie said gently, smoothing Jill's hair back with a damp washcloth.

"No fucking shit," Jill replied, shooting him a dirty look. Her face softened immediately, though, and her head rolled to the side as he dipped the cloth behind her neck. "How is she?"

"Ella's still fine." The stupidly self-satisfied grin that appeared when he emerged from the room several hours prior to announce he had a daughter didn't waver. "Your nurse said she'd return when she had an update."

"That's a pretty name," Rose told Jill, who smiled tiredly in response.

"Ella Masen. With an 'E'," she added. "I told Eddie I'd compromise if I could change the spelling. No way was I giving my firstborn the name of a dead novice and curse her forever."

Eddie rolled his eyes and sat in his chair on the other side of Jill's bed. "She wouldn't be cursed. We've been over this."

"You don't know that," Jill shot back. She sighed. "I'm sorry I keep snapping at you."

"Stop apologizing." Eddie dropped a kiss to Jill's arm and rubbed his thumb along her wrist. "I told you that you were allowed to be mean to me today."

"And tomorrow I'll be back to normal," Jill promised with a laugh while Rose pretended to gag.

"I know you guys just finished creating life and all that, but _ew_ ," Rose joked.

Silence fell for a moment before Jill focused on Rose. "How are you, by the way? I know it's been all about me today, but you got back this morning, right?"

"I'll be okay if everyone stops asking me how I'm doing," Rose sighed. "But, in all honesty…" She looked between Jill and Eddie before letting her mask fall. Lissa and Christian had left a while ago, and it was just the three of them in the room for the time being. At least until a nurse inevitably showed up to take Jill's vitals yet again. "I miss Dimitri. A whole fucking lot. I mean, I missed him when he went back to work, but now that I'm no longer even in Europe, let alone Baia…" She ran her free hand through her hair. "He feels so much farther away."

Jill gave Rose's hand a tired squeeze of comfort. "I went crazy for the two weeks Eddie was over there with you back in March. I can't imagine what you're going through right now."

Rose mumbled her gratitude; Eddie, his expression soft and understanding, then asked when she'd last spoken to him.

"Two days ago, I think? I was still in Moscow. I told him I'd call him once I was back and set up my international plan on my phone because no way am I dropping a dollar a minute just to hear him complain about getting stuck with Lyuba Antonovna on daylight security." She tilted her head. "And I think I've only cried three times today, which was hard to do with Lissa around, but I managed."

Eddie and Jill glanced at each other and let out a long sigh. "When are you going to tell her?" Jill asked quietly. "She doesn't know now but there's no way you can keep this up forever."

Rose groaned. "I have no idea. I keep coming up with reasons not to tell her — she's planning a wedding and her baby's due in two months — but I know it's all just excuses. I don't know. I will. I'll have to. I just don't know when."

"Ten bucks says you're just going to 'wait for the time to be right' before it inevitably blows up in your face," Eddie joked, and Rose couldn't help but wearily laugh.

"Yeah, something like that." She shook her head. "I've never been very good with confrontation."

A nurse knocked on Jill's door before pushing it open. "You know what I'm here for," she sing-songed as Rose stood up to let her get to Jill.

"Hi, Janet," Jill replied, her voice sounded more exhausted than it had five minutes ago as she stuck her arm out for a blood pressure reading.

"I'm gonna get going," Rose said, seeing an opportunity to escape to her still freezing apartment and fall asleep for what she hoped would be three days straight. "Congratulations again, Jill."

She merely lifted a hand in response, overtaken by her nurse, and Eddie stood. "I'll walk you out," he said.

In the hallway, she shared with Eddie what felt like her millionth hug of the day, and she let the full weight of the day settle over her.

"Can I say something sappy?" Eddie asked, warmly gripping Rose's shoulders.

"Go for it," she said with a shrug.

"You'll be okay." There was a faraway edge to the look in his eyes, and Rose briefly wondered where this was coming from. "Readjusting will be hard and you're probably going to cry every day for who knows how long, but you'll make it through."

It occurred to her then that out of everyone she knew who was in the loop about Dimitri, Eddie likely had the closest idea of what she was feeling.

"And while I know Jill and I are about to be more exhausted than we ever thought we'd be in our lives, you are always welcome to come hide out with us and miss him and be as sad as you need, day or night, whenever that is for you," Eddie finished.

Tears pricking her eyes, Rose nodded furiously. "Thanks, man. I appreciate it." She paused, considering her friend before her. "You know, if Mason were here, I think he'd find the both of us just a little ridiculous."

Eddie barked out a laugh.

"I'm right, though," she added, the corners of her mouth forcing their way up despite the heaviness in her bones. "You're a dad now, I'm pining over some guy I met in _Siberia_ , and even though we're acting like this is the end of our old lives, we're only twenty-three. We've got so much time ahead of us to keep acting like we're going to die tomorrow."

His smile turned rueful and he slid his arms back around her for another hug. "Yeah, you'll be fine, even if you do sound _exactly_ like your boyfriend."

"Ha ha, thanks a lot," Rose said, giving Eddie one last squeeze before stepping out of the hug. "I'm off to go sleep for a week now."

"You do that," Eddie said, clapping a hand on Rose's shoulder. "You know where I am."

Rose nodded. "I'll see you around."

* * *

 **Rose [09:13 EST]:** I'm finally home. Jill had her baby almost as soon as I got home. I'll call you when I wake up. Love you.

 **Dimitri [16:36 EST]:** That sounds like a lot. I'll be waiting. Love you too.


End file.
